The cooperative behaviour of interacting neurons and synapses is studied using models and methods from statistical physics. The competition between training error and entropy may lead to discontinuous properties of the neural network. This is demonstrated for a few examples: Perceptron, associative memory, learning from examples, generalization, multilayer networks, structure recognition, Bayes...

The problem of noisy and unbalanced training data for supervised keyphrase extraction results from the subjectivity of keyphrase assignment, which we quantify by crowdsourcing keyphrases for news and fashion magazine articles with many annotators per document. We show that annotators exhibit substantial disagreement, meaning that single annotator data could lead to very different training sets ...

The conditional phrase translation probabilities constitute the principal components of phrase-based machine translation systems. These probabilities are estimated using a heuristic method that does not seem to optimize any reasonable objective function of the word-aligned, parallel training corpus. Earlier efforts on devising a better understood estimator either do not scale to reasonably size...

Musculoskeletal disorders lead to pain and suffering and result in high costs to industry. There is evidence to suggest that whereas conventional ergonomics training programs result in knowledge gains, they may not necessarily translate to changes in behavior. There were 11 participants in an ergonomics training program, and a subsample of participants received a motivational intervention in th...

BACKGROUND Childhood lead poisoning has not made the list of national public health priorities in Lebanon. This study aims at identifying the prevalence and risk factors for elevated blood lead concentrations (B-Pb >or= 100 microg/L) among 1-3 year old children. It also examines the need for universal blood lead screening. METHODS This is a cross-sectional study of 281 well children, presenti...

BACKGROUND Lead (Pb) is a toxic element that occurs in elevated concentrations in soils, mostly as a result of anthropogenic activities. This study assess the Pb bioavailability in soils from two areas with different contamination level using Diffusive Gradients in Thin-Films (DGT) technique, single extractions and metal contents of vegetables grown on contaminated soils. RESULTS In the area ...

INTRODUCTION To assess the salivary composition of proteins and minerals in smokers compared with non-smokers. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this study we compared the total protein and Ca, Na, K, Mg, Pb of whole saliva in two groups of men (28 smokers and 31nonsmokers) aged between 29-41years. RESULTS Fifty-nine participants were evaluated. The mean age was 33.14±5.32 years among smokers and 32...

Blood lead among pregnant women, even at modest levels, may impair offspring cognitive development. We examine whether blood lead levels (BLLs) result from current versus historic exposures, among a cohort of pregnant women. Cumulative logit models were used to characterize the relationship between maternal risk factors and higher BLLs. Maternal blood lead levels more likely result from lead re...

Use of statistical classi cation methods in symbol recognition requires the speci cation of a number of model parameters Such parameters are usually ob tained from a training set This paper describes meth ods for improving parameter estimates obtained from a training set The improvement is made by us ing new observations for updating the parameter es timates The class membership of these new ob...