This paper presents two minimum Bayes risk (MBR) based Answer Re-ranking (MBRAR) approaches for the question answering (QA) task. The first approach re-ranks single QA system’s outputs by using a traditional MBR model, by measuring correlations between answer candidates; while the second approach reranks the combined outputs of multiple QA systems with heterogenous answer extraction components ...

Soluble microbial products (SMP) have been long time considered the major cause of membrane fouling when membrane bioreactors (MBR) are used for wastewater treatment. As a result, the formation and degradation of SMP have been incorporated in the conventional ASM models for a better prediction of MBR performance. This paper studies the impact of SMP modelling when optimizing the start-up of an ...

We present Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR) decoding for statistical machine translation. This statistical approach aims to minimize expected loss of translation errors under loss functions that measure translation performance. We describe a hierarchy of loss functions that incorporate different levels of linguistic information from word strings, word-to-word alignments from an MT system, and syntactic...

Wastewater treatment plants in Ohio and elsewhere in the U.S. operating with MBR systems are required to disinfect permeate. This requirement results in an increased cost to both capital and O&M, and with chlorination there is a potential increase in the formation of disinfection byproducts. Disinfection following MBR treatment may not be needed if the MBR process alone removes microorganisms a...

BACKGROUND Shortened (12 months) multidrug multibacillary regimen (MDT MBR) was implemented in India in 1998, however there is yet a paucity of crucial data on its long-term outcome. OBJECTIVE To assess the efficacy of 12 months MDT MBR in multibacillary (MB) patients at our centre. DESIGN This was a retrospective study undertaken analysing the clinic records of 1210 patients registered at ...

A sequential batch reactor (SBR) and a membrane bioreactor (MBR) were inoculated with the same sludge from a municipal wastewater treatment plant, supplemented with ammonium, and operated in parallel for 84 days. It was investigated whether the functional stability of the nitrification process corresponded with a static ammonia-oxidizing bacterial (AOB) community. The SBR provided complete nitr...

Much attention has recently been devoted to the life and behaviour of pharmaceuticals in the water cycle. In this study the behaviour of several pharmaceutical products in different therapeutic categories (analgesics and antiinflammatory drugs, lipid regulators, antibiotics, etc.) was monitored during treatment of wastewater in a laboratoryscale membrane bioreactor (MBR). The results were compa...

A membrane-coupled aerobic bioreactor (MBR) can be described as a system coupling the aerobic bioreactor, or activated sludge tank, of a wastewater treatment system with a microor ultrafiltration membrane. The membrane serves to separate the suspended material in the sludge so that the permeate stream is free of chemicals, microorganisms, and other contaminants. The membrane may be either inter...

BACKGROUND Multiple births are associated with serious adverse infant and maternal outcomes. The objective of this study was to assess the multiple-birth risk (MBR) associated with IVF and determine whether the risk is impacted by stage of embryo development at transfer. METHODS A population-based sample of 50 819 IVF transfers utilizing day 3 or day 5 embryos performed in the USA in 2001 on ...

This paper presents a novel model abstraction and representation approach for the application of model-based reasoning (MBR) to helicopter powertrain diagnostics. Although the basic principles of MBR are well understood, its application to specific domains, especially in mechanical systems, has been restricted due to insufficient model fidelity. The traditional vibration analysis approach has b...