MultiLexNorm: A Shared Task on Multilingual Lexical Normalization

Lexical normalization is the task of transforming an utterance into its standardized form. This task is beneficial for downstream analysis, as it provides a way to harmonize (often spontaneous) linguistic variation. Such variation is typical for social media on which information is shared in a multitude of ways, including diverse languages and code-switching. Since the seminal work of Han and Baldwin (2011) a decade ago, lexical normalization has attracted attention in English and multiple other languages. However, there exists a lack of a common benchmark for comparison of systems across languages with a homogeneous data and evaluation setup. The MULTILEXNORM shared task sets out to fill this gap. We provide the largest publicly available multilingual lexical normalization benchmark including 12 language variants. We propose a homogenized evaluation setup with both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation. As extrinsic evaluation, we use dependency parsing and part-of-speech tagging with adapted evaluation metrics (a-LAS, a-UAS, and a-POS) to account for alignment discrepancies. The shared task hosted at W-NUT 2021 attracted 9 participants and 18 submissions. The results show that neural normalization systems outperform the previous state-of-the-art system by a large margin. Downstream parsing and part-of-speech tagging performance is positively affected but to varying degrees, with improvements of up to 1.72 a-LAS, 0.85 a-UAS, and 1.54 a-POS for the winning system

Laser-slicing of silicon with 3D nonlinear laser lithography

Recently, we have showed a direct laser writing method that exploits nonlinear interactions to form subsurface modifications in silicon. Here, we use the technique to demonstrate laser-slicing of silicon and its applications

Structural, optical and magnetic properties of Cd1-xCo xS thin films prepared by spray pyrolysis

Structural, optical and magnetic properties of CdS thin films with the addition of Co prepared by (i) spray pyrolysis of Cd1-xCo xS (x?0.10) thin films (Type 1) and (ii) Co diffusion doped CdS films (Type 2) were investigated. The undoped film has a hexagonal structure with a strong (112) preferred orientation. As the Co concentration in CdS is increased, the preferred orientation changes from (112) to (002) direction. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis shows that Co atoms on the surface of films are found to be bounded either to S atoms or O atoms. Although most of the bindings of Co atoms include Co-O bondings, some of them replace the Cd atoms by making chemical bounds with S atoms. The transmittance spectra indicate the four characteristic absorption maxima at the wavelengths of 680, 685, 729 and 744 nm, which were not observed for the undoped CdS film. Band gap energy Eg decreases from 2.43 to 2.37 eV with increasing Co content from x = 0 to 0.10. The Co-doped Cd1-xCoxS films grown by spray pyrolysis (Type 1) didnot show any sign of ferromagnetic behavior. However, the Co diffused CdS films (Type 2) have clear ferromagnetic loops. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

A Study on Tetragonal-star like Shaped Inverted Pyramid Texturing

48th IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference, PVSC 2021 -- 20 June 2021 through 25 June 2021 -- -- 171495Surface texturing is one of the key process steps in solar cell fabrication. For an ideal surface texturing, surface recombination should be kept as low as possible while the light trapping property is improved. The formation of a random inverted pyramids is a good candidate with its improved light trapping properties compared to standard upright pyramid texturing and its reduced surface roughness compared to nanowire texturing resulting in reduced surface recombination velocity. In this work, we investigate a single step, lithography-free, Cu-assisted inverted pyramid texturing resulting in significantly reduced surface reflection on p-type Cz-Si. With the help of randomly distributed star-shaped inverted pyramid texturing on p-type Si, the weighted average reflection was reduced to 3% for p-type Si between 400-1000 nm. As a first cell trial, standard Al-BSF cells were fabricated using industrial process tools on p-wafer with star-shaped IPs. The low-cost, effective and repeatable nature of the developed single-step etching process has a high potential to replace surface texturing steps in the large-scale solar cell production cycle. Due to the implantation of star-shaped inverted pyramids to Al-BSF Si solar cell fabrication, short circuit current density was improved by more than 3.5%, resulting in 39.1mA/cm2. © 2021 IEEE

The first principles study on PtC compound

WOS: 000257450300008We have studied structural, thermodynamic, elastic, and electronic properties of platinum carbide (PtC) in zinc-blende and rock-salt structures by performing ab initio calculations within the LDA approximations. Particularly, we have focused on the structural and the pressure dependence of elastic moduli and related quantities. The other basic key properties, such as the lattice constant, cohesive energy, the phase transition pressure, bulk modulus and its pressure derivative are also repeated and compared with the other available experimental and theoretical works. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

The effects of human umbilical cord blood transplantation in rats with experimentally induced spinal cord injury

Object. Even though there have been many efforts to recover neuronal dysfunction following spinal cord injuries, there are limitations to the treatment of these injuries. The purpose of this laboratory investigation was to determine the clinical and neurophysiological effects of human umbilical cord blood (HUCB) transplantation in a rat hemisection model of spinal cord injury. Methods. In this study, experimental hemisection of the thoracic spinal cord was performed in rats. The rats were divided into 4 groups (6 rats in each group). One group of rats (Group 1) underwent thoracic laminectomy only. Rats in Group 2 underwent laminectomy and right hemisection of the thoracic spinal cord. Rats in Group 3 underwent right hemisection and implantation of freshly obtained HUCB on Day 0 postinjury. Rats in Group 4 underwent hemisection and implantation of freshly obtained HUCB on Day 4 postinjury. Clinical evaluations of rat motor function included the following: neurological examination, Rotarod performance, and inclined plane tests. Rats also underwent reflex evaluation. Results. The neurological examinations revealed that the frequency of plegic rats was 70.8% at the beginning of the study across all 4 groups; this value decreased to 20.8% by the end of the study. The percentage of rats with a normal examination increased from 25% to 50%. The results of Rotarod performance and 8-week inclined plane performance tests showed statistical significance (p < 0.05) in an overall group comparison across all time points. At the end of the 8 weeks, a statistically significant difference was found in the inclined plane test results between rats in Groups 1 and 2. There were no statistically significant differences between Groups 1, 3, and 4 (p < 0.05). When the reflex responses of the hemisectioned sides were compared, statistically significant differences were detected between groups (p < 0.05). All groups were significantly different with regard to the right-side reflex response score (p < 0.05). Spinal cord preparations of rats in all groups were examined for histopathological changes. Conclusions. Human umbilical cord blood is stem cell rich and easily available, and it carries less risk of inducing a graft-versus-host reaction in the recipient. Human umbilical cord blood serum is also noted to contain stem cell-promoting factors, which is why cell isolation was not used in this study. Freshly obtained cord blood was also used because storage of cord blood has been reported to have some negative effects on stem cells. Transplantation of freshly obtained HUCB into the hemisectioned spinal cord experimental model demonstrated clinical and neurophysiological improvement