University of Zagreb

About: University of Zagreb is a education organization based out in Zagreb, Grad Zagreb, Croatia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & European union. The organization has 21769 authors who have published 50267 publications receiving 783239 citations. The organization is also known as: Zagreb University & Sveučilište u Zagrebu.

TakeLab: Systems for Measuring Semantic Text Similarity

Abstract: This paper describes the two systems for determining the semantic similarity of short texts submitted to the SemEval 2012 Task 6. Most of the research on semantic similarity of textual content focuses on large documents. However, a fair amount of information is condensed into short text snippets such as social media posts, image captions, and scientific abstracts. We predict the human ratings of sentence similarity using a support vector regression model with multiple features measuring word-overlap similarity and syntax similarity. Out of 89 systems submitted, our two systems ranked in the top 5, for the three overall evaluation metrics used (overall Pearson -- 2nd and 3rd, normalized Pearson -- 1st and 3rd, weighted mean -- 2nd and 5th).

Lactobacillus plantarum with Functional Properties: An Approach to Increase Safety and Shelf-Life of Fermented Foods.

Abstract: Lactobacillus plantarum (widespread member of the genus Lactobacillus) is one of the most studied species extensively used in food industry as probiotic microorganism and/or microbial starter. The exploitation of Lb. plantarum strains with their long history in food fermentation forms an emerging field and design of added-value foods. Lb. plantarum strains were also used to produce new functional (traditional/novel) foods and beverages with improved nutritional and technological features. Lb. plantarum strains were identified from many traditional foods and characterized for their systematics and molecular taxonomy, enzyme systems (α-amylase, esterase, lipase, α-glucosidase, β-glucosidase, enolase, phosphoketolase, lactase dehydrogenase, etc.), and bioactive compounds (bacteriocin, dipeptides, and other preservative compounds). This review emphasizes that the Lb. plantarum strains with their probiotic properties can have great effects against harmful microflora (foodborne pathogens) to increase safety and shelf-life of fermented foods.