Dublin City University

About: Dublin City University is a education organization based out in Dublin, Ireland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Context (language use) & Machine translation. The organization has 5904 authors who have published 17178 publications receiving 389376 citations. The organization is also known as: National Institute for Higher Education, Dublin & DCU.

Sentiment Analysis of Political Tweets: Towards an Accurate Classifier

Abstract: We perform a series of 3-class sentiment classification experiments on a set of 2,624 tweets produced during the run-up to the Irish General Elections in February 2011. Even though tweets that have been labelled as sarcastic have been omitted from this set, it still represents a difficult test set and the highest accuracy we achieve is 61.6% using supervised learning and a feature set consisting of subjectivity-lexicon-based scores, Twitter- specific features and the top 1,000 most dis- criminative words. This is superior to various naive unsupervised approaches which use subjectivity lexicons to compute an overall sentiment score for a pair.

Terrorism and the Internet: New Media—New Threat?

Abstract: The Internet is a powerful political instrument, which is increasingly employed by terrorists to forward their goals. The five most prominent contemporary terrorist uses of the Net are information provision, financing, networking, recruitment, and information gathering. This article describes and explains each of these uses and follows up with examples. The final section of the paper describes the responses of government, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and others to the terrorism-Internet nexus. There is a particular emphasis within the text on the UK experience, although examples from other jurisdictions are also employed.

Major Secretory Antigens of the Helminth Fasciola hepatica Activate a Suppressive Dendritic Cell Phenotype That Attenuates Th17 Cells but Fails To Activate Th2 Immune Responses

Abstract: Fasciola hepatica is a helminth pathogen that drives Th2/Treg immune responses in its mammalian host. The parasite releases a large number of molecules that are critical to inducing this type of immune response. Here we have selected recombinant forms of two major F. hepatica secreted molecules, the protease cathepsin L (rFhCL1) and an antioxidant, sigma class glutathione transferase (rFhGST-si), to examine their interactions with dendritic cells (DCs). Despite enzymatic and functional differences between these molecules, both induced interleukin-6 (IL-6), IL-12p40, and macrophage inflammatory protein 2 (MIP-2) secretion from DCs and enhanced CD40 expression. While this induction was mediated by Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), the subsequent intracellular signaling pathways differed; rFhCL1 signaled through p38, and rFhGST-si mediated its effect via c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK), p38, p-NF-κBp65, and IRF5. Neither rFhCL1 nor rFhGST-si enhanced DC phagocytosis or induced Th2 immune responses in vivo. However, DCs matured in the presence of either enzyme attenuated IL-17 production from OVA peptide-specific T cells in vivo. In addition, DCs exposed to either antigen secreted reduced levels of IL-23. Therefore, both F. hepatica FhCL1 and FhGST-si modulate host immunity by suppressing responses associated with chronic inflammation—an immune modulatory mechanism that may benefit the parasite's survival within the host.

Proteome analysis of the dystrophin-deficient MDX diaphragm reveals a drastic increase in the heat shock protein cvHSP.

Abstract: Duchenne muscular dystrophy is the most commonly inherited neuromuscular disorder in humans. Although the primary genetic deficiency of dystrophin in X-linked muscular dystrophy is established, it is not well-known how pathophysiological events trigger the actual fibre degeneration. We have therefore performed a DIGE analysis of normal diaphragm muscle versus the severely affected x-linked muscular dystrophy (MDX) diaphragm, which represents an established animal model of dystrophinopathy. Out of 2398 detectable 2-D protein spots, 35 proteins showed a drastic differential expression pattern, with 21 proteins being decreased, including Fbxol 1-protein, adenylate kinase, beta-haemoglobin and dihydrolipoarnide dehydrogenase, and 14 proteins being increased, including cvHSP, aldehyde reductase, desmin, vimentin, chaperonin, cardiac and muscle myosin heavy chain. This suggests that lack of sarcolemmal integrity triggers a generally perturbed protein expression pattern in dystrophin-deficient fibres. However, the most significant finding was the dramatic increase in the small heat shock protein cvHSP, which was confirmed by 2-D immunoblotting. Confocal fluorescence microscopy revealed elevated levels of cvHSP in MDX fibres. An immunoblotting survey of other key heat shock proteins showed a differential expression pattern in MDX diaphragm. Stress response appears to be an important cellular mechanism in dystrophic muscle and may be exploitable as a new approach to counteract muscle degeneration.

The First Surface Realisation Shared Task: Overview and Evaluation Results

Abstract: The Surface Realisation (SR) Task was a new task at Generation Challenges 2011, and had two tracks: (1) Shallow: mapping from shallow input representations to realisations; and (2) Deep: mapping from deep input representations to realisations. Five teams submitted six systems in total, and we additionally evaluated human toplines. Systems were evaluated automatically using a range of intrinsic metrics. In addition, systems were assessed by human judges in terms of Clarity, Readability and Meaning Similarity. This report presents the evaluation results, along with descriptions of the SR Task Tracks and evaluation methods. For descriptions of the participating systems, see the separate system reports in this volume, immediately following this results report.