Automatic Title Generation for Learning Resources and Pathways with Pre-trained Transformer Models

To create curiosity and interest for a topic in online learning is a challenging task. A good preview that outlines the contents of a learning pathway could help learners know the topic and get interested in it. Towards this end, we propose a hierarchical title generation approach to generate semantically relevant titles for the learning resources in a learning pathway and a title for the pathway itself. Our approach to Automatic Title Generation for a given text is based on pre-trained Transformer Language Model GPT-2. A pool of candidate titles are generated and an appropriate title is selected among them which is then refined or de-noised to get the final title. The model is trained on research paper abstracts from arXiv and evaluated on three different test sets. We show that it generates semantically and syntactically relevant titles as reflected in ROUGE, BLEU scores and human evaluations. We propose an optional abstractive Summarizer module based on pre-trained Transformer model T5 to shorten medium length documents. This module is also trained and evaluated on research papers from arXiv dataset. Finally, we show that the proposed model of hierarchical title generation for learning pathways has promising results.

How the Titles of Popular Songs have Changed over the Last 60 Years

Billboard magazine has been keeping track of the 100 hottest (most popular) songs of the year since 1958. Lists of the Hot 100 titles from 1960 to 2019 (6001 titles) were used to study the way in which popular song titles changed over time. Based on significant polynomial regression trends and significant results from a discriminant function analysis, it is concluded that there were three main phases in titles (early, middle, and late) and that these phases differ in predictable manners in terms of stylistic features such as length, abstraction, activity, and the use of the word “love”. Early phase titles are longer, more concrete, more passive, and they do not use the word “love” often; middle phase titles are of medium length, more abstract, of medium activation, and use the word “love” frequently. Titles of the last phase are shorter, more concrete, more active, and do not often employ the word love. A possible factor contributing to these differences is the rise in popularity of rock and roll and hip-hop respectively and their different periods of ascendency.

Degenerate Quantum LDPC Codes With Good Finite Length Performance

We study the performance of medium-length quantum LDPC (QLDPC) codes in the depolarizing channel. Only degenerate codes with the maximal stabilizer weight much smaller than their minimum distance are considered. It is shown that with the help of OSD-like post-processing the performance of the standard belief propagation (BP) decoder on many QLDPC codes can be improved by several orders of magnitude. Using this new BP-OSD decoder we study the performance of several known classes of degenerate QLDPC codes including hypergraph product codes, hyperbicycle codes, homological product codes, and Haah's cubic codes. We also construct several interesting examples of short generalized bicycle codes. Some of them have an additional property that their syndromes are protected by small BCH codes, which may be useful for the fault-tolerant syndrome measurement. We also propose a new large family of QLDPC codes that contains the class of hypergraph product codes, where one of the used parity-check matrices is square. It is shown that in some cases such codes have better performance than hypergraph product codes. Finally, we demonstrate that the performance of the proposed BP-OSD decoder for some of the constructed codes is better than for a relatively large surface code decoded by a near-optimal decoder.

Medium-Length Lipids Facilitate Cell-Permeability and Bioactivity

The majority of bioactive molecules act on membrane proteins or intracellular targets and therefore needs to partition into or cross biological membranes. Natural products often exhibit lipid modifications to facilitate critical molecule-membrane interactions and in many cases their bioactivity is markedly reduced upon removal of a lipid group. However, despite its importance in nature, lipid-conjugation of small molecules is not commonly used in chemical biology and medicinal chemistry, and the effect of such conjugation has not been systematically studied. To understand the composition of lipids found in natural products, we carried out a chemoinformatic characterization of the ‘natural product lipidome’. According to this analysis, lipidated natural products predominantly contain saturated linear medium-length lipids, which are significantly shorter than those found in membranes and lipidated proteins. To study the usefulness of such modifications in probe design, we systematically explored the effect of lipid conjugation on five different small molecule chemotypes and find that permeability, cellular retention, subcellular localization, and bioactivity can be significantly modulated depending on the type of lipid tail used. We demonstrate that medium-length lipid tails can render impermeable molecules cell-permeable and switch on their bioactivity. Saturated medium-length lipids (e.g. C10) are found to be ideal for the bioactivity of small molecules in mammalian cells, while saturated long-chain lipids (e.g. C18) often significantly reduce bioavailability and activity. Together, our findings suggest that conjugation of small molecules with medium-length lipids could be a powerful strategy for the design of probes and drugs.

Canonical and Divergent N-Terminal HBx Isoform Proteins Unveiled: Characteristics and Roles during HBV Replication

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) X protein (HBx) is a viral regulatory and multifunctional protein. It is well-known that the canonical HBx reading frame bears two phylogenetically conserved internal in-frame translational initiation codons at Met2 and Met3, thus possibly generating divergent N-terminal smaller isoforms during translation. Here, we demonstrate that the three distinct HBx isoforms are generated from the ectopically expressed HBV HBx gene, named XF (full-length), XM (medium-length), and XS (short-length); they display different subcellular localizations when expressed individually in cultured hepatoma cells. Particularly, the smallest HBx isoform, XS, displayed a predominantly cytoplasmic localization. To study HBx proteins during viral replication, we performed site-directed mutagenesis to target the individual or combinatorial expression of the HBx isoforms within the HBV viral backbone (full viral genome). Our results indicate that of all HBx isoforms, only the smallest HBx isoform, XS, can restore WT levels of HBV replication, and bind to the viral mini chromosome, thereby establishing an active chromatin state, highlighting its crucial activities during HBV replication. Intriguingly, we found that sequences of HBV HBx genotype H are devoid of the conserved Met3 position, and therefore HBV genotype H infection is naturally silent for the expression of the HBx XS isoform. Finally, we found that the HBx XM (medium-length) isoform shares significant sequence similarity with the N-terminus domain of the COMMD8 protein, a member of the copper metabolism MURR1 domain-containing (COMMD) protein family. This novel finding might facilitate studies on the phylogenetic origin of the HBV X protein. The identification and functional characterization of its isoforms will shift the paradigm by changing the concept of HBx from being a unique, canonical, and multifunctional protein toward the occurrence of different HBx isoforms, carrying out different overlapping functions at different subcellular localizations during HBV genome replication. Significantly, our current work unveils new crucial HBV targets to study for potential antiviral research, and human virus pathogenesis.

The Modern Novella or nouvelle beyond the Short Story and the Novel

The modern novella or nouvelle is an object of artistic order of concentration and suggestion. In it, there is a tension between the objective and the subjective, circumstances that bring it closer to other literary forms different from the short story and the novel. Based on this idea, this article presents and discusses the closeness of the modern novella with drama and poem, literary and artistic expressions that also achieve their aesthetic effects through a short or medium length.

Laymen’s Narratives in Amouddou’s Eco-documentary: An Ecolinguistic Analysis

Documentary films, generally of short or medium-length, have informative and educational purposes. They present authentic reports on areas of life, human activities, and the natural world. Particularly, eco-documentaries aim to raise environmental awareness towards the degradation of natural elements; they present alternatives for environmental issues such as pollution, global warming, and deforestation. To reinforce the argumentative process of environmental documentaries, laymen discourse contributes a lot to the meaning-making of productions. Within the framework of discourse analysis and ecolinguistics, this work examines fear and threat expressions used by ordinary witnesses to reinforce argumentation in Lahoucine Faouzi’s eco-documentary entitled “Whining of the Blue Lagoon. In this vein, the ‘perceived severity and perceived susceptibility’ model was used to investigate the implication of fear and threat appeals in laymen’s testimonies. The results show that these expressions are common among laymen’s narratives. This study has many implications for eco-documentary makers, governmental and non-governmental organs, and future research to explore other linguistic features in eco-documentaries on man’s perpetrated damages to the environmental resources.

Effects of Natural Environmental Stimulation Duration on Psychophysiological Recovery Benefits

The rapid pace of modern life, as well as chronic work and academic overloading, contribute to our society’s progressively increasing stress levels. Chronic stress can affect both physical and mental well-being. Numerous studies have confirmed that viewing a nature-based video presentation can reduce stress and result in attention recovery. However, the discourse has been primarily focused upon stimulation applied over a single duration, rather than over various durations. Therefore, the present study explored the effect of various viewing durations with regard to forest-related videos on stress reduction and attention recovery. Before the videos’ presentation, the participants’ stress and distraction levels were increased through stimulation. Data on stress, attention, and relaxation were collected through the implementation of the State–Trait Anxiety Inventory and an electroencephalogram instrument. Equal numbers from the 90 participants (i.e., 30) were assigned to watch a short, medium-length, or long video (5, 10, and 20 minutes in duration, respectively). The viewing of 20-minute forest-related videos significantly promoted stress reduction and physiological relaxation. The present findings advance the understanding of the relationship between viewing nature scenes duration and psychophysiological states; thus, they serve as a reference for future research on the natural-dose concept, as well as the development of relevant activities and courses.

Soft decoding of short/medium length codes using ordered statistics for quantum key distribution

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a cryptographic communication protocol that utilizes quantum mechanical properties for provable absolute security against an eavesdropper. The communication is carried between two terminals using random photon polarization states represented through quantum states. Both these terminals are interconnected through disjoint quantum and classical channels. Information reconciliation using delay controlled joint decoding is performed at the receiving terminal. Its performance is characterized using data and error rates. Achieving low error rates is particularly challenging for schemes based on error correcting codes with short code lengths. This article addresses the decoding process using ordered statistics decoding for information reconciliation of both short and medium length Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem codes over a QKD link. The link’s quantum channel is modeled as a binary symmetric quantum depolarization channel, whereas the classical channel is configured with additive white Gaussian noise. Our results demonstrate the achievement of low bit error rates, and reduced decoding complexity when compared to other capacity achieving codes of similar length and configuration.