Making Neural QA as Simple as Possible but not Simpler

Recent development of large-scale question answering (QA) datasets triggered a substantial amount of research into end-to-end neural architectures for QA. Increasingly complex systems have been conceived without comparison to simpler neural baseline systems that would justify their complexity. In this work, we propose a simple heuristic that guides the development of neural baseline systems for the extractive QA task. We find that there are two ingredients necessary for building a high-performing neural QA system: first, the awareness of question words while processing the context and second, a composition function that goes beyond simple bag-of-words modeling, such as recurrent neural networks. Our results show that FastQA, a system that meets these two requirements, can achieve very competitive performance compared with existing models. We argue that this surprising finding puts results of previous systems and the complexity of recent QA datasets into perspective

Neural Question Answering at BioASQ 5B

This paper describes our submission to the 2017 BioASQ challenge. We participated in Task B, Phase B which is concerned with biomedical question answering (QA). We focus on factoid and list question, using an extractive QA model, that is, we restrict our system to output substrings of the provided text snippets. At the core of our system, we use FastQA, a state-of-the-art neural QA system. We extended it with biomedical word embeddings and changed its answer layer to be able to answer list questions in addition to factoid questions. We pre-trained the model on a large-scale open-domain QA dataset, SQuAD, and then fine-tuned the parameters on the BioASQ training set. With our approach, we achieve state-of-the-art results on factoid questions and competitive results on list questions

The recognition of the prosodic focus position in German-learning infants from 4 to 14 months

The aim of the present study was to elucidate in a study with 4-, 6-, 8-, and 14-month-old German-learning children, when and how they may acquire the regularities which underlie Focus-to-Stress Alignment (FSA) in the target language, that is, how prosody is associated with specific communicative functions. Our findings suggest, that 14-month-olds have already found out that German allows for variable focus positions, after having gone through a development which goes from a predominantly prosodically driven processing of the input to a processing where prosody interacts more and more with the growing lexical and syntactic knowledge of the child

Book review: the icon project: architecture, cities and capitalist globalisation by Leslie Sklair

In The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities and Capitalist Globalisation, Leslie Sklair investigates the institutional and economic structures that have underpinned the accelerated production of so-called ‘iconic’ buildings and infrastructure projects over the last 25 years. While the text could occasionally benefit from more theoretical anchoring, this will be an illuminating text for students of architecture, urban design and policy that links urban social justice, architectural form and ideology, finds Frederik Weissenborn

Book review: urban re-industrialization edited by Krzysztof Nawratek

In Urban Re-Industrialization, editor Krzysztof Nawratek brings together scholars to discuss the constitutive elements of the image of the creative city and explore ways of moving beyond it towards what Nawratek calls the 'Industrial City 2.0'. While the nature and contribution of the individual essays are at times uneven, this is a kaleidoscopic work which weaves together diverse and intriguing lines of worthwhile ..

Hybrid stars in the light of the massive pulsar PSR J1614-2230

We perform a systematic study of hybrid star configurations using several parametrizations of a relativistic mean-field hadronic EoS and the NJL model for three-flavor quark matter. For the hadronic phase we use the stiff GM1 and TM1 parametrizations, as well as the very stiff NL3 model. In the NJL Lagrangian we include scalar, vector and 't Hooft interactions. The vector coupling constant $g_v$ is treated as a free parameter. We also consider that there is a split between the deconfinement and the chiral phase transitions which is controlled by changing the conventional value of the vacuum pressure $- \Omega_0$ in the NJL thermodynamic potential by $- (\Omega_0 + \delta \Omega_0)$, being $\delta \Omega_0$ a free parameter. We find that, as we increase the value of $\delta \Omega_0$, hybrid stars have a larger maximum mass but are less stable, i.e. hybrid configurations are stable within a smaller range of central densities. For large enough $\delta \Omega_0$, stable hybrid configurations are not possible at all. The effect of increasing the coupling constant $g_v$ is very similar. We show that stable hybrid configurations with a maximum mass larger than the observed mass of the pulsar PSR J1614-2230 are possible for a large region of the parameter space of $g_v$ and $\delta \Omega_0$ provided the hadronic equation of state contains nucleons only. When the baryon octet is included in the hadronic phase, only a very small region of the parameter space allows to explain the mass of PSR J1614-2230. We compare our results with previous calculations of hybrid stars within the NJL model. We show that it is possible to obtain stable hybrid configurations also in the case $\delta \Omega_0=0$ that corresponds to the conventional NJL model for which the pressure and density vanish at zero temperature and chemical potential.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures; typos in Table 1 have been correcte

Identification and engineering of a Dye-Decolorizing Peroxidase (DyP) for C—C-bond forming carbene-transfer reactions

A new enzymatic reaction-type of carbene-transfer reactions has been shown by the seminal work of Arnold and coworkers in 2013.[1] An impressive set of reactions was demonstrated since then predominantly employing the enzymes P450BM3, Myoglobin and cytochrome C.[2] Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract