Non-Fluent Synthetic Target-Language Data Improve Neural Machine Translation.

When the amount of parallel sentences available to train a neural machine translation is scarce, a common practice is to generate new synthetic training samples from them. A number of approaches have been proposed to produce synthetic parallel sentences that are similar to those in the parallel data available. These approaches work under the assumption that non-fluent target-side synthetic training samples can be harmful and may deteriorate translation performance. Even so, in this paper we demonstrate that synthetic training samples with non-fluent target sentences can improve translation performance if they are used in a multilingual machine translation framework as if they were sentences in another language. We conducted experiments on ten low-resource and four high-resource translation tasks and found out that this simple approach consistently improves translation performance as compared to state-of-the-art methods for generating synthetic training samples similar to those found in corpora. Furthermore, this improvement is independent of the size of the original training corpus, the resulting systems are much more robust against domain shift and produce less hallucinations.

Implications of migratory and exotic birds and the mosquito community on West Nile virus transmission.

BACKGROUND: Vector-borne diseases like West Nile virus (WNV) pose a global health challenge, with rising incidence and distribution. Culex mosquitoes are crucial WNV vectors. Avian species composition and bird community diversity, along with vector communities, influence WNV transmission patterns. However, limited knowledge exists on their impact in southwestern Spain, an area with active WNV circulation in wild birds, mosquitoes, and humans. METHODS: To address this, we conducted a comprehensive study investigating the contributions of migratory and exotic bird species to WNV transmission and the influence of mosquito community composition. RESULTS: Analysing 1194 serum samples from 44 avian species, we detected WNV antibodies in 32 samples from 11 species, four for the first time in Europe. Migratory birds had higher WNV exposure likelihood than native and exotic species, and higher phylogenetic diversity in bird communities correlated with lower exposure rates. Moreover, in 5859 female mosquitoes belonging to 12 species, we identified WNV competent vectors like Cx. pipiens s.l. and the Univittatus subgroup. Birds with WNV antibodies were positively associated with competent vector abundance, but negatively with overall mosquito species richness. CONCLUSIONS: These findings highlight the complex interactions between bird species, their phylogenetics, and mosquito vectors in WNV transmission. Understanding these dynamics will help to implement effective disease control strategies in southwestern Spain.

Kalman filters improve LSTM network performance in problems unsolvable by traditional recurrent nets.

The long short-term memory (LSTM) network trained by gradient descent solves difficult problems which traditional recurrent neural networks in general cannot. We have recently observed that the decoupled extended Kalman filter training algorithm allows for even better performance, reducing significantly the number of training steps when compared to the original gradient descent training algorithm. In this paper we present a set of experiments which are unsolvable by classical recurrent networks but which are solved elegantly and robustly and quickly by LSTM combined with Kalman filters.

Fasciolasis en Cajamarca / Fasciolasis in Cajamarca

El presente estudio es descriptivo, retrospectivo, y se basa en la revisión de historias clínicas y reportes operatorios del Hospital Regional de Cajamarca entre abril de 1996 y marzo de 2001. Se analizaron 101 casos con diagnóstico coproparasitológico de fasciolasis. La mayor proporción de casos (62,4 por ciento) se encontró entre los 0 y 19 años de edad; la relación hombre/mujer fue de 1 a 2. El síntoma principal fue el dolor abdominal con un 84.5 por ciento. El tiempo de enfermedad promedio fue menor o igual a tres meses (43,5 por ciento). La eosinofilia se presentó en el 48 por ciento de pacientes. En la revisión de 162 pacientes postcolecistectomía el 1,2 por ciento presentó hallazgo de fasciola hepática. Además una paciente de este grupo fue operada por hematoma intrahepático antes del diagnóstico de fasciolasis. Concluimos que esta enfermedad sigue siendo una patología endémica en Cajamarca.