Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Duplicate Question Detection

We address the problem of detecting duplicate questions in forums, which is an important step towards automating the process of answering new questions. As finding and annotating such potential duplicates manually is very tedious and costly, automatic methods based on machine learning are a viable alternative. However, many forums do not have annotated data, i.e., questions labeled by experts as duplicates, and thus a promising solution is to use domain adaptation from another forum that has such annotations. Here we focus on adversarial domain adaptation, deriving important findings about when it performs well and what properties of the domains are important in this regard. Our experiments with StackExchange data show an average improvement of 5.6% over the best baseline across multiple pairs of domains.Comment: EMNLP 2018 short paper - camera ready. 8 page

Représentation à base de connaissance pour une méthode de classification transductive de document multilangue

International audienceMultilingual document classification is often addressed by approaches that rely on language-specific resources (e.g., bilingual dictionaries and machine translation tools) to evaluate cross-lingual document similarities. However, the required transformations may alter the original document semantics, raising additional issues to the known difficulty of obtaining high-quality labeled datasets. To overcome such issues we propose a new framework for multilingual document classification under a transductive learning setting. We exploit a large-scale multilingual knowledge base, BabelNet, to support the modeling of different language-written documents into a common conceptual space, without requiring any language translation process. We resort to a state-of-the-art transductive learner to produce the document classification. Results on two real-world multilingual corpora have highlighted the effectiveness of the proposed document model w.r.t. document representations usually involved in multilingual and cross-lingual analysis, and the robustness of the transductive setting for multilingual document classification

Charge transfer and trapping as origin of a double dip in the transfer characteristics of graphene based field-effect transistors

We discuss the origin of an additional dip other than the charge neutrality point observed in transfer characteristics of graphene-based field-effect transistors. The double-dip is proved to arise from charge transfer between graphene and metal electrodes, while charge storage at the graphene/SiO2 interface enhances it. Considering different Fermi energy from the neutrality point along the channel and partial charge pinning at the contacts, we propose a model which explains all features in gate voltage loops.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

MultiLingMine 2016: Modeling, Learning and Mining for Cross/Multilinguality. In: Advances in Information Retrieval

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30671-1 83The increasing availability of text information coded in many different languages poses new challenges to modern information retrieval and mining systems in order to discover and exchange knowledge at a larger world-wide scale. The 1st International Workshop on Modeling, Learning and Mining for Cross/Multilinguality (dubbed MultiLingMine 2016) provides a venue to discuss research advances in cross-/multilingual related topics, focusing on new multidisciplinary research questions that have not been deeply investigated so far (e.g., in CLEF and related events relevant to CLIR). This includes theoretical and experimental on-going works about novel representation models, learning algorithms, and knowledge-based methodologies for emerging trends and applications, such as, e.g., cross-view cross-/multilingual information retrieval and document mining, (knowledge-based) translation-independent cross-/multilingual corpora, applications in social network contexts, and more.Ienco, D.; Roche, M.; Romeo, S.; Rosso, P.; Tagarelli, A. (2016). MultiLingMine 2016: Modeling, Learning and Mining for Cross/Multilinguality. In: Advances in Information Retrieval. En Advances in Information Retrieval. Springer Verlag (Germany). 869-873. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-30671-1_83S869873Bandyopadhyay, S., Poibeau, T., Saggion, H., Yangarber, R.: Proceedings of the Workshop on Multi-source Multilingual Information Extraction and Summarization (MMIES). ACL (2008)Chiarcos, C., McCrae J.P., Montiel, E., Simov, K., Branco, A., Calzolari, N., Osenova, P., Slavcheva, M., Vertan, C.: Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics: Multilingual Knowledge Resources and NLP (LDL) (2014)McCrae, J.P., Vulcu, G.: CEUR Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on the Multilingual Semantic Web (MSW4), vol. 1532 (2015)Moens, M.-F., Vulié, I.: Multilingual probabilistic topic modeling and its applications in web mining and search. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM WSDM Conference (2014)Steichen, B., Ferro, N., Lewis, D., Chi, E.E.: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Multilingual Web Access (MWA) (2015)The CLEF Initiative. http://www.clef-initiative.eu

Enjoy your journey: the bergamot polyphenols from the tree to the cell metabolism

No abstract availabl

Modified partial circumcision for phimosis: techniques and surgical outcomes

Objectives: In the last years, many surgical techniques of preputioplasty have aimed to preserve the foreskin in case of phimosis. These techniques are not reliable for patients affected by phimosis linked to balanitis xerotica obliterans (BXO) and scarred foreskin. We tried an original technique of resection of the pathological foreskin, removing the mucosal internal layer followed by reconstruction of the foreskin. The aim was to evaluate the outcome of paediatric patients who underwent modified partial circumcision for pathological phimosis.Patients and methods: In all, 360 patients with phimosis underwent modified partial circumcision at our institution. The mean age of the boys was 8.9 years, range 5–15 years. In 145 (40.3%) cases, indication for surgery was clinical suspicion of BXO, in 215 (59.7%) cases it was chronic inflammation of the foreskin.Results: In all cases, the postoperative period was uneventful. Cosmesis was considered by parents as excellent in 95.2% of patients. In these patients, the glans was almost completely covered by soft foreskin. Histopathological examination of the removed foreskin documented BXO in 162 (45%). Twelve (3.3%) patients complained of recurrences and five (1.4%) patients of smegmatic cysts.Conclusion: The described surgical technique of modified partial circumcision for the correction of pathological phimosis appears cosmetically well accepted, safe, and simple with low rate of late postoperative complications.Keywords: balanitis xerotica obliterans, circumcision, partial circumcision, phimosi

Robot-assisted excision of urachal cyst: case report in a child

Abstract Background The urachus is an embryological structure of the urogenital sinus and allantoid that connects the allantois to the early bladder in fetal life and then remains as the median umbilical ligament connecting the umbilicus to the dome of the bladder. An early laparoscopic procedure could trigger a quiescent urachal remnant to become symptomatic, causing a lesion or infection either during carbon oxide contamination or insufflation or a periumbilical or suprapubic port placement. Case presentation A 15-year-old girl complaining of supra-pubic abdominal pain. About 2 months previously, she had undergone laparoscopic appendectomy for acute appendicitis, and early postoperative period was uneventful. She underwent a robotic-assisted excision of a urachal cyst. Conclusions It has been suggested that early laparoscopic procedures could trigger previously asymptomatic urachal remnants to become symptomatic. Robot-assisted excision of a urachal cyst is a safe, effective alternative to open surgery in children

Treatment of esophageal achalasia in children: Today and tomorrow

Esophageal achalasia (EA) is a rare esophageal motility disorder in children. Laparoscopic Heller myotomy (LHM) represents the treatment of choice in young patients. Peroral endoscopic myotomy (POEM) is becoming an alternative to LHM. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness, safety, and outcomes of POEM vs LHM in treatment of children with EA. Data of pediatric patients with EA, who underwent LHM and POEM from February 2009 to December 2013 in two centers, were collected. Eighteen patients (9 male, mean age: 11.6 years; range: 2-17 years) were included. Nine patients (6 male, mean age: 10.7 years; range: 2-16 years) underwent LHM, and the other 9 (3 males, mean age: 12.2 years; range: 6-17 years) underwent POEM procedure. Mean operation time was shorter in POEM group compared with LHM group (62/149 minutes). Myotomy was longer in POEM group than in LHM group (11/7 cm). One major complication occurred after LHM (esophageal perforation). No clinical and manometric differences were observed between LHM and POEM in follow-up. The incidence of iatrogenic gastroesophageal reflux disease was low (1 patient in both groups). Results of a midterm follow-up show that LHM and POEM are safe and effective treatments also in children. Besides, POEM is a mini-invasive technique with an inferior execution timing compared to LHM. A skilled endoscopic team is mandatory to perform this procedur

Correlative imaging of cystic lymphangiomas: ultrasound, CT and MRI comparison

Cystic lymphangioma is a rare benign lesion derived from the detachment of the lymph sacs from venous drainage systems; the treatment of choice is a surgical excision and the final diagnosis is of histological type

User Simulation with Large Language Models for Evaluating Task-Oriented Dialogue

One of the major impediments to the development of new task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems is the need for human evaluation at multiple stages and iterations of the development process. In an effort to move toward automated evaluation of TOD, we propose a novel user simulator built using recently developed large pretrained language models (LLMs). In order to increase the linguistic diversity of our system relative to the related previous work, we do not fine-tune the LLMs used by our system on existing TOD datasets; rather we use in-context learning to prompt the LLMs to generate robust and linguistically diverse output with the goal of simulating the behavior of human interlocutors. Unlike previous work, which sought to maximize goal success rate (GSR) as the primary metric of simulator performance, our goal is a system which achieves a GSR similar to that observed in human interactions with TOD systems. Using this approach, our current simulator is effectively able to interact with several TOD systems, especially on single-intent conversational goals, while generating lexically and syntactically diverse output relative to previous simulators that rely upon fine-tuned models. Finally, we collect a Human2Bot dataset of humans interacting with the same TOD systems with which we experimented in order to better quantify these achievements.Comment: 13 page