Machine reading comprehension (MRC) refers to the process of instructing machines to comprehend and respond to inquiries based on a provided text. There are two primary methodologies for achieving this: extracting answers directly from the text or predicting them. Extracting answers involves anticipating the specific segment of text containing the answer, pinpointed by its starting and ending indices within the paragraph. Despite the increasing interest in MRC, exploration within the framework of the Arabic language faces limitations due to various challenges. A significant impediment arises from the inadequacy of resources available for Arabic textual content, which impedes the development of effective models. Furthermore, the inherent intricacies of Arabic, manifesting in its diverse linguistic forms including classical, modern standard, and colloquial, present distinctive hurdles for tasks involving language comprehension. This paper proposes an enhanced version of the bidirectional attention flow (BIDAF) model for Arabic MRC, constructed upon the Arabic Span-Extraction-based Reading Comprehension Benchmark (ASER). ASER comprises 10,000 sets of questions, answers, and passages, partitioned into a training set constituting 90% of the data and a testing set making up the remaining 10%. By introducing a new input feature based on parts-of-speech (POS) word embeddings and replacing Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (bi-LSTM) with bidirectional gated recurrent unit, significant improvements were observed. Eight different POS word embeddings were generated using both Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) and Skip-gram methods, with varying dimensionalities. Evaluation metrics, including exact match (EM) and F1-measure, were utilized to assess model performance, with emphasis on the latter for its accuracy. The proposed enhanced BIDAF model achieved a remarkable accuracy of 75.22% on the ASER dataset, demonstrating its efficacy in Arabic MRC tasks. Additionally, rigorous statistical evaluation using a two-tailed paired samples t-test further validated the findings, highlighting the significance of the proposed enhancements in advancing Arabic language processing capabilities.

Working equids support the livelihoods of millions of low-income households worldwide and face several welfare challenges. Although equipment-related wounds are common, little is known about specific risk factors. This cross-sectional study surveyed equids used for cart-work in three Ethiopian towns. Number, size, severity and location of wounds were recorded for each animal, as well as work equipment characteristics and indicators of equipment fit and assembly. Questionnaires were conducted with each cart-driver focusing on equipment practices and attitudes. Logistic regression models were generated to investigate associations between equipment-related wounds (outcome) and equipment, work, driver and animal-related factors (predictors). In total, 369 equids and cart-drivers were surveyed. The prevalence of equipment-related wounds was 72.6% (268/369) with girth wounds being the predominant wound type in horses (50%; 122/244) while donkeys had predominantly shaft-related wounds (59%; 72/122). Donkeys were two times more likely to have equipment-related wounds than horses. The presence of equipment-related wounds was associated with factors such as previously having wounds, inadequate collar positioning and using purchased equipment compared to partly home-made equipment. Characteristics of specific equipment components were also associated with certain wound types, such as narrow saddle pressure points and saddle wounds. Equipment-related wounds are highly prevalent in working equids, representing a serious welfare concern. Factors relating to equipment design, fit and assembly were associated with the presence of wounds. Importantly, species differences require tailoring of preventive approaches amongst working equids. A better understanding of work equipment should therefore be promoted as part of wound prevention and animal welfare strategies.

Crowd monitoring for sports games is important to improve public safety, game experience, and venue management. Recent crowd-crushing incidents (e.g., the Kanjuruhan Stadium disaster) have caused 100+ deaths, calling for advancements in crowd-monitoring methods. Existing monitoring approaches include manual observation, wearables, video-, audio-, and WiFi-based sensing. However, few meet the practical needs due to their limitations in cost, privacy protection, and accuracy.

In this paper, we introduce a novel crowd monitoring method that leverages floor vibrations to infer crowd reactions (e.g., clapping) and traffic (i.e., the number of people entering) in sports stadiums. Our method allows continuous crowd monitoring in a privacy-friendly and cost-effective way. Unlike monitoring one person, crowd monitoring involves a large population, leading to high uncertainty in the vibration data. To overcome the challenge, we bring in the context of crowd behaviors, including (1) temporal context to inform crowd reactions to the highlights of the game and (2) spatial context to inform crowd traffic in relation to the facility layouts. We deployed our system at Stanford Maples Pavilion and Michigan Stadium for real-world evaluation, which shows a 14.7% and 12.5% error reduction compared to the baseline methods without the context information.

Bell’s palsy is acute facial palsy due to inflammation involving the facial nerve related to infections. Rates have not been noted to differ by ethnicity. We studied the lifetime prevalence in First Nations and all other Manitobans in people with type 2 diabetes mellitus aged 7 and older in 2013–2014 and 2016–2017. We found a crude lifetime prevalence of 9.9% [95% CI 9.4–10.4%] in the First Nations population versus 3.9% [95% CI 3.8–4.0%] in all other Manitobans. It is unknown if there were differences in glycemic control. The increased prevalence was found in all five provincial health regions. This study indicates that ethnicity may be an important risk factor for Bell’s palsy.

This article reviews the development of mental health and psychiatric services in Australia for the international reader. The development of relevant legislation, health-care systems, and the effectiveness of treatment for people with schizophrenia is reviewed. Gaps in service delivery and future directions are considered.