QuesNet: A Unified Representation for Heterogeneous Test Questions

Understanding learning materials (e.g. test questions) is a crucial issue in online learning systems, which can promote many applications in education domain. Unfortunately, many supervised approaches suffer from the problem of scarce human labeled data, whereas abundant unlabeled resources are highly underutilized. To alleviate this problem, an effective solution is to use pre-trained representations for question understanding. However, existing pre-training methods in NLP area are infeasible to learn test question representations due to several domain-specific characteristics in education. First, questions usually comprise of heterogeneous data including content text, images and side information. Second, there exists both basic linguistic information as well as domain logic and knowledge. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel pre-training method, namely QuesNet, for comprehensively learning question representations. Specifically, we first design a unified framework to aggregate question information with its heterogeneous inputs into a comprehensive vector. Then we propose a two-level hierarchical pre-training algorithm to learn better understanding of test questions in an unsupervised way. Here, a novel holed language model objective is developed to extract low-level linguistic features, and a domain-oriented objective is proposed to learn high-level logic and knowledge. Moreover, we show that QuesNet has good capability of being fine-tuned in many question-based tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale real-world question data, where the experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of QuesNet for question understanding as well as its superior applicability

Long-Term Efficacy of Successful Excisional Goniotomy with the Kahook Dual Blade

Isabella V Wagner,1 Nithya Boopathiraj,1 Connor Lentz,1 Emily Aashna Dorairaj,2 Christian Draper,3 Devesh Kumar,4 Leticia Checo,1 Darby D Miller,1 Chelsey Krambeer,1 Syril Dorairaj1 1Department of Ophthalmology, Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, FL, USA; 2Department of Medicine, Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA; 3Department of Ophthalmology, Eye Consultants, Spokane, WA, USA; 4Department of Ophthalmology, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USACorrespondence: Syril Dorairaj, Department of Ophthalmology, Mayo Clinic, 4500 San Pablo Road, Jacksonville, FL, USA, Tel +1 904-953-2377, Fax +1 904-953-7040, Email [email protected]: To report clinical outcomes of successful excisional goniotomy with the Kahook Dual Blade (KDB), through 60 months.Patients and methods: This was a noncomparative, single-surgeon, retrospective review of eyes receiving successful KDB goniotomy with or without concomitant phacoemulsification between October 2015 and January 2016 with five years of uninterrupted follow-up. Intraocular pressure (IOP), number of glaucoma medications, best corrected visual acuity (BCVA), and complications were recorded. Primary outcomes included changes from baseline in IOP, medication use, and BCVA, through five years.Results: Fifty-two eyes of 28 patients were analyzed. Most eyes had mild primary open angle glaucoma (73%). Of the eyes analyzed, 41 underwent combined surgery and 11 underwent standalone surgery. With all eyes combined, mean (standard deviation) baseline IOP was 21.0 (4.1) mmHg and mean baseline medication use was 1.8 (1.1) medications per eye. Across time points at months 6, 12, 24, 36, 48, and 60, mean postoperative IOP ranged from 13.0 to 13.7 mmHg, representing mean reductions of 7.3– 8.0 mmHg (34.7– 38.3%; p < 0.0001 at every time point). Similarly, mean medication use ranged from 0.4 to 0.6 medications per eye, representing mean reductions of 1.2– 1.4 medications (66– 75.5%; p < 0.0001 at every time point). Mean logMAR BCVA improved from 0.321 (0.177) preoperatively to 0.015 (0.035) at month 60 (p < 0.0001).Conclusion: In eyes not requiring secondary surgical procedures (eg, long-term surgical successes), excisional goniotomy provided clinically and statistically significant reductions in both IOP and the need for medications that were highly consistent through five years of follow-up. KDB goniotomy appears to be highly successful in Caucasian patients with open angle glaucoma on ≥ 1 IOP-lowering medications at baseline and with no history of prior ocular surgery. Successful excisional goniotomy with the KDB can be expected to improve long-term glaucoma-related visual outcomes through IOP reduction and to improve quality of life through medication reduction.Keywords: glaucoma, goniotomy, intraocular pressure, IOP-lowering medications, phacoemulsification, minimally invasive glaucoma surger