Evaluation of Unsupervised Entity and Event Salience Estimation

Salience Estimation aims to predict term importance in documents.Due to few existing human-annotated datasets and the subjective notion of salience, previous studies typically generate pseudo-ground truth for evaluation. However, our investigation reveals that the evaluation protocol proposed by prior work is difficult to replicate, thus leading to few follow-up studies existing. Moreover, the evaluation process is problematic: the entity linking tool used for entity matching is very noisy, while the ignorance of event argument for event evaluation leads to boosted performance. In this work, we propose a light yet practical entity and event salience estimation evaluation protocol, which incorporates the more reliable syntactic dependency parser. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis among popular entity and event definition standards, and present our own definition for the Salience Estimation task to reduce noise during the pseudo-ground truth generation process. Furthermore, we construct dependency-based heterogeneous graphs to capture the interactions of entities and events. The empirical results show that both baseline methods and the novel GNN method utilizing the heterogeneous graph consistently outperform the previous SOTA model in all proposed metrics.

The Modern Swedish National Seismic Network: Two Decades of Intraplate Microseismic Observation

The Swedish National Seismic Network (SNSN) was modernized and rapidly expanded during the period 1998–2012. The network currently operates 68 permanent seismic stations, all with broadband instruments supplying real-time continuous data at 100 samples per second. Continuous data from 10 stations are shared with the international community via Orfeus, and approximately 10 stations of their individual choice are shared with institutes in neighboring countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Germany). The SNSN uses the South Iceland Lowland (SIL) system as the primary system for automatic detection and event definition. In addition, an in-house system based on migration and stacking is used for automatic detection of small events, and implementations of SeisComP (SC) and Earthworm are used primarily for rapid detection of larger regional events. Global monitoring is performed with SC, using approximately 250 global stations, and we operate a continuous rapid risk assessment system serving Swedish crisis management authorities. Since the start of automatic processing in August 2000, the SNSN has recorded and interactively analyzed more than 171,000 seismic events, of which 10,700 were earthquakes with local magnitudes ranging from around −1 to 4.3. The microearthquake activity detected in the last 20 yr has significantly improved the identification and understanding of seismically active structures in Sweden.

A protocol for probabilistic extreme event attribution analyses

Over the last few years, methods have been developed to answer questions on the effect of global warming on recent extreme events. Many “event attribution” studies have now been performed, a sizeable fraction even within a few weeks of the event, to increase the usefulness of the results. In doing these analyses, it has become apparent that the attribution itself is only one step of an extended process that leads from the observation of an extreme event to a successfully communicated attribution statement. In this paper we detail the protocol that was developed by the World Weather Attribution group over the course of the last 4 years and about two dozen rapid and slow attribution studies covering warm, cold, wet, dry, and stormy extremes. It starts from the choice of which events to analyse and proceeds with the event definition, observational analysis, model evaluation, multi-model multi-method attribution, hazard synthesis, vulnerability and exposure analysis and ends with the communication procedures. This article documents this protocol. It is hoped that our protocol will be useful in designing future event attribution studies and as a starting point of a protocol for an operational attribution service.

Self-reported sleep duration and timing: A methodological review of event definitions, context, and timeframe of related questions

Background Clinical practice guidelines and population health recommendations are derived from studies that include self-reported data. Small semantic differences in question wording and response scales, may significantly affect the response. We conducted a methodological review to assess the variation in event definition(s), context (i.e., work- versus free-day), and timeframe of sleep timing and duration questions. Methods We queried multiple databases of sleep, medicine, public health, and psychology for survey-based studies and/or publications with sleep duration and/or timing questions. The text of these questions was extracted and thematically analyzed by two trained coders. Results We identified 49 surveys that included sleep duration and/or timing questions. Sample sizes of participants in the reviewed publications using these surveys ranged from 93 to 1,185,106. For sleep duration questions, participants were asked to report nocturnal sleep (22/43), sleep in the past 24-hours (15/43), their major sleep episode (3/43), or no event definition was given (3/43). Among bedtime questions, participants were asked to report the time into bed (17/40), fall asleep time (10/40), or first attempt to sleep (13/40). For wake time questions, participants were asked to report their out of bed time (3/36), the time they get up (6/36), or their wake up time (27/36). Context (e.g., work versus free day) guidance was provided in 18/43 major sleep duration questions, 31/40 bedtime questions, and 30/36 wake time questions. Timeframe (e.g., the past 4 weeks) was provided in 6/43 major sleep episode duration questions, 9/40 bedtime questions, and 3/36 wake time questions. Among the surveys analyzed, only one question asked about the method of awakening (e.g., spontaneously or by alarm clock), 15 questions assessed sleep latency, and eight measured napping. Conclusion There is large variability in the event definition(s), context, and timeframe of questions relating to duration, bed/wake times, latency, and napping. This work may inform future efforts at data harmonization for meta-analyses, provide options for question wording for researchers and clinicians, and be used to identify candidate questions for future surveys.

Event Reconstruction in the Tracking System of the CBM Experiment

The Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment (CBM) will investigate strongly interacting matter at high net-baryon densities by measuring nucleus-nucleus collisions at the FAIR research centre in Darmstadt, Germany. Its ambitious aim is to measure at very high interaction rates, unprecedented in the field of experimental heavy-ion physics so far. This goal will be reached with fast and radiation-hard detectors, self-triggered read-out electronics and streaming data acquisition without any hardware trigger. Collision events will be reconstructed and selected in real-time exclusively in software. This puts severe requirements to the algorithms for event reconstruction and their implementation. We will discuss some facets of our approaches to event reconstruction in the main tracking device of CBM, the Silicon Tracking System, covering local reconstruction (cluster and hit finding) as well as track finding and event definition.

EXTREME METEO-OCEANIC EVENTS

The two-step framework for over-threshold modelling of environmental extremes proposed in Bernardara et al. (2014) for univariate analyses is generalized to an event-based framework applicable to multivariate analyses. The distinction between sequential values (temporal observations at a given time step) and the event-describing values (such as storm peaks in univariate POT extrapolations) is further detailed and justified. The classification of multivariate analyses introduced in Mazas and Hamm (2017) is refined and linked to the meaning of the concepts of event, sampling and return period that is thoroughly examined; their entanglement being highlighted. In particular, sampling is shown to be equivalent to event definition, identification and description. Event and return period definition are also discussed with respect to the source phenomena or to response (or structure) phenomena. The extreme event approach is thus proposed as a comprehensive framework for univariate and multivariate analyses for assessing natural hazards, seemingly applicable to any field of environmental studies.

Defining and analyzing the frequency and severity of flood events to improve risk management from a reinsurance standpoint

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) debt has accelerated research into private flood insurance options. Offering this coverage begins with the ability to transfer the risk to the reinsurance market. Within the industry, perils such as hurricanes and earthquakes have standard definitions, but no such definition exists for floods. An event definition must examine the spatial and temporal aspects of the flood as well as the complexities of individual events. In this paper we were able to apply a data-driven methodology to capture and aggregate flood peaks into independent events. To aggregate flood peaks into independent events we needed to define what constituted a basin as our area of aggregation. The USGS utilizes the hydrological unit code (HUC) a 2- to 12-digit code that follows the Pfafsetter Coding System. The HUC code is used to identify varying levels of basin sizes ranging from region (2 digits) to subwatershed (12 digits). We chose to analyze both the HUC8 and HUC6, and a total of 7932 HUC8 events and 8444 HUC6 events were recorded during the 15 water years used in our study. Each event was characterized by duration, magnitude and severity. Focusing on the HUC8, events were unevenly distributed nationally while severity was relatively evenly distributed. The goal for our study was to take a method and be able to apply it to basins of varying characteristics. This framework relied on the ability to analyze the individual processes related to each individual basin.