Semi-automatic Endogenous Enrichment of Collaboratively Constructed Lexical Resources: Piggybacking onto Wiktionary

International audienceThe lack of large-scale, freely available and durable lexical resources, and the consequences for NLP, is widely acknowledged but the attempts to cope with usual bottlenecks preventing their development often result in dead-ends. This article introduces a language-independent, semi-automatic and endogenous method for enriching lexical resources, based on collaborative editing and random walks through existing lexical relationships, and shows how this approach enables us to overcome recurrent impediments. It compares the impact of using different data sources and similarity measures on the task of improving synonymy networks. Finally, it defines an architecture for applying the presented method to Wiktionary and explains how it has been implemented

Kodex ou comment organiser les résultats d'une recherche d'information par détection de communautés sur un graphe biparti ?

International audienceInformation Retrieval Systems (IRS) generally display results as a list of documents.One may think that a deeper structure exists within results. This hypothesis is reinforced bythe fact that most of the graphs produced from real data (e.g., graphs of documents) sharesome structural properties, and in particular a community structure. We propose to use theseproperties to better organize the set of returned documents for a query from a given IRS. For thispurpose, the retrieved document set is modeled as a bipartite graph (Documents ↔ Terms) onwhich the Kodex community detection algorithm is applied. This paper presents Kodex and itsevaluation : regarding F1 measure, Kodex overcomes baseline Okapi BM25 by 22%.Les Systèmes de Recherche d’Information structurent en général leurs résultats sousla forme d’une liste de documents. Nous pensons qu’il existe une structure plus riche dansces résultats. En effet, la plupart des graphes obtenus à partir de données réelles (entre autre,les graphes de documents) partagent certaines propriétés structurelles, en particulier uneorganisation en communautés que nous proposons d’exploiter afin de mieux organiser l’ensembledes documents restitués pour une requête. Pour ce faire, l’ensemble des documents restitués estmodélisé par un graphe biparti (Documents ↔ Termes) sur lequel est appliqué notre algorithmeKodex de détection de communautés. Cet article présente Kodex et son évaluation : sur la mesureF1 , Kodex améliore significativement la baseline Okapi BM25 de 22 %

Collaborative study to evaluate a candidate World Health Organization international standard for chikungunya virus for nucleic acid amplification technique (NAT)-based assays

Collaborative Study Group - Portugal:Maria João Alves, Líbia Zé-Zé (National Institute of Health Dr. Ricardo Jorge, Center for Vectors and Infectious Diseases Research)This report describes the World Health Organization (WHO) project to develop an international standard (IS) for Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) RNA for use with nucleic acid amplification technique (NAT)-based assays. An international collaborative study was conducted to determine the potency of the candidate standard using a range of NAT-based assays for CHIKV, and to evaluate the suitability of the candidate for the calibration of secondary reference materials and the standardization of CHIKV viral load measurements. The candidate standard consisted of a heat inactivated CHIKV strain of the East/South/Central African genotype (ESCA), also known as the Indian Ocean Lineage, isolated from a patient returning from India to the United States in 20061 , diluted in human negative plasma. The lyophilized candidate preparation (Sample 1), the corresponding liquid-frozen bulk material (Sample 2) and three different clinical samples (Sample 3, Sample 4 and Sample 5) were included in the collaborative study. Twenty-five laboratories representing 14 countries participated in the study to evaluate the material using their routine CHIKV NAT assays. Twenty-four laboratories returned 31 data sets from 17 commercial assays and 14 in-house methods. Of these 31 methods, 11 were quantitative and 20 were qualitative. The results of the study indicate the suitability of the candidate material of the CHIKV strain of ESCA genotype (Sample 1) as the proposed 1st WHO IS for CHIKV. It is therefore proposed that the candidate material (PEI code 11785/16) is established as the 1st WHO IS for CHIKV RNA for NAT-based assays with an assigned potency of 2,500,000 International Units (IU)/mL when reconstituted in 0.5 mL of nuclease-free water. On-going studies for real-time and accelerated stability of the proposed IS indicate that the preparation is stable and suitable for long-term use under the proposed storage conditions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

BACANAL : Balades Aléatoires Courtes pour ANAlyses Lexicales Application à la substitution lexicale

International audienceNous proposons ici des méthodes de désambiguisation sémantique par substition lexicale pour la tâche 1 de l'atelier SemDis2014. Les méthodes exposées dans ce papier sont toutes bâties à partir de balades aléatoires courtes dans des graphes unipartis ou bipartis construits sur diverses ressources. Certaines de ces méthodes n'utilisent que des graphes construits automatiquement à partir de corpus (méthodes non supervisées), d'autres utilisent des graphes construits à partir de ressources produites « à la main » par des lexicographes ou par les foules (méthodes supervisées). Abstract. In this paper, we propose word sense disambiguation methods based on lexical substitution and used for the task 1 of the SemDis2014 workshop. This methods are run by using short random walks on unipartite networks or bipartite networks. Some of these methods only use graphs automatically built from corpora (unsurpervised methods), others also use graphs built from handcraft resources filled by lexicographers or by the crowds (supervised methods). Mots-clés : désambiguisation sémantique, substition lexicale, réseaux lexicaux, balades aléatoires courtes

Neutron irradiation of coated conductors

Various commercial coated conductors were irradiated with fast neutrons in order to introduce randomly distributed, uncorrelated defects which increase the critical current density, Jc, in a wide temperature and field range. The Jc-anisotropy is significantly reduced and the angular dependence of Jc does not obey the anisotropic scaling approach. These defects enhance the irreversibility line in not fully optimized tapes, but they do not in state-of-the-art conductors. Neutron irradiation provides a clear distinction between the low field region, where Jc is limited by the grain boundaries, and the high field region, where depinning leads to dissipation

Effect of a high surface-to-volume ratio on fluorescence-based assays

In the work discussed in this paper, the effect of a high surface-to-volume ratio of a microfluidic detection cell on fluorescence quenching was studied. It was found that modification of the geometry of a microchannel can provide a wider linear range. This is a phenomenon which should be taken into consideration when microfluidic systems with fluorescence detection are developed. The dependence of the linear range for fluorescein on the surface-to-volume ratio was determined. Both fluorescence inner-filter effects and concentration self-quenching were taken into consideration. It was found that inner-filter effects have little effect on the extent of the linear range on the microscale. [Figure: see text

Heaven and Hell at the Paradise Motel

This piece is taken from the novel “Heaven and Hell at the Paradise Motel” and the exegesis that together forms my PhD thesis. The three main strands of this thesis are Gothic, Noir and sense of place. The novel, ‘‘Heaven and Hell at the Paradise Motel”, is preoccupied with the natural environment, its subtle seasonal changes and the way the environment impacts on its human inhabitants and how they in turn affect it. The novel is, in a very Gothic sense, haunted by dreams, apparitions and narratives – specifically mini-narratives that reflect the nature of fairy tales, horror stories and urban myths. It contains elements of melodrama, horror, romance. The story follows a deeply dysfunctional family through a seasonal cycle: beginning in Spring and ending once again in Spring. A key focus for both the creative and the theoretical work was the everyday application of the Gothic and Noir – for example a house doesn’t have to be a castle to be haunted; people don’t have to be monsters to be monstrous. The dark, the strange, the sinister and the perverse lurk in the shadows of everyday reality, but also how these elements intertwined within the landscape

PRZEGLĄD WYBRANYCH METOD MAGAZYNOWANIA ENERGII ELEKTRYCZNEJ

The article contains basic information about selected mechanical, electrical and electrochemical techniques of electrical energy storage. Due to the rising popularity of renewable resources, electrical energy storage systems will play more and more significant role in the power engineering, electronics, car manufacturing and other key areas. This situation leads to the need to raise awareness of electrical energy storage.W artykule zawarte zostały informacje na temat obecnego stanu rozwoju wybranych metod mechanicznych, elektrycznych i elektrochemicznych magazynowania energii elektrycznej. Ze względu na wzrost popularności odnawialnych źródeł energii, magazynowanie energii elektrycznej będzie odgrywało coraz ważniejszą rolę w elektroenergetyce, elektronice oraz innych kluczowych obszarach. Ta sytuacja prowadzi do potrzeby podnoszenia świadomości w zakresie magazynowania energii elektrycznej