Bar-Ilan University

About: Bar-Ilan University is a education organization based out in Ramat Gan, Israel. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 12835 authors who have published 34964 publications receiving 995648 citations. The organization is also known as: Bar Ilan University & BIU.

Are We Modeling the Task or the Annotator? An Investigation of Annotator Bias in Natural Language Understanding Datasets

Abstract: Crowdsourcing has been the prevalent paradigm for creating natural language understanding datasets in recent years. A common crowdsourcing practice is to recruit a small number of high-quality workers, and have them massively generate examples. Having only a few workers generate the majority of examples raises concerns about data diversity, especially when workers freely generate sentences. In this paper, we perform a series of experiments showing these concerns are evident in three recent NLP datasets. We show that model performance improves when training with annotator identifiers as features, and that models are able to recognize the most productive annotators. Moreover, we show that often models do not generalize well to examples from annotators that did not contribute to the training set. Our findings suggest that annotator bias should be monitored during dataset creation, and that test set annotators should be disjoint from training set annotators.

LRIG1 restricts growth factor signaling by enhancing receptor ubiquitylation and degradation

Abstract: Kekkon proteins negatively regulate the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) during oogenesis in Drosophila. Their structural relative in mammals, LRIG1, is a transmembrane protein whose inactivation in rodents promotes skin hyperplasia, suggesting involvement in EGFR regulation. We report upregulation of LRIG1 transcript and protein upon EGF stimulation, and physical association of the encoded protein with the four EGFR orthologs of mammals. Upregulation of LRIG1 is followed by enhanced ubiquitylation and degradation of EGFR. The underlying mechanism involves recruitment of c-Cbl, an E3 ubiquitin ligase that simultaneously ubiquitylates EGFR and LRIG1 and sorts them for degradation. We conclude that LRIG1 evolved in mammals as a feedback negative attenuator of signaling by receptor tyrosine kinases.

Charge-transfer materials for electrochemical water desalination, ion separation and the recovery of elements

Abstract: Reversible electrochemical processes are a promising technology for energy-efficient water treatment. Electrochemical desalination is based on the compensation of electric charge by ionic species, through which the ions are immobilized and, thereby, removed from a feed-water stream flowing through a desalination cell. For decades, electrochemical desalination has focused on the use of carbon electrodes, but their salt-removal ability is limited by the mechanism of ion electrosorption at low molar concentrations and low charge-storage capacity. Recently, charge-transfer materials, often found in batteries, have demonstrated much larger charge-storage capacities and energy-efficient desalination at both low and high molar strengths. In this Review, we assess electrochemical-desalination mechanisms and materials, including ion electrosorption and charge-transfer processes, namely, ion binding with redox-active polymers, ion insertion, conversion reactions and redox-active electrolytes. Furthermore, we discuss performance metrics and cell architectures, which we decouple from the nature of the electrode material and the underlying mechanism to show the versatility of cell-design concepts. These charge-transfer processes enable a wealth of environmental applications, ranging from potable-water generation and industrial-water remediation to lithium recovery and heavy-metal-ion removal. Electrochemical processes enable energy-efficient desalination of water and the separation and recovery of elements. In this Review, we discuss the mechanisms and materials of this emerging generation of water-remediation technology.