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The task of Dialogue Act (DA) tagging, a crucial component in many conversational agents, is often addressed assuming a single DA per speaker turn in the conversation. However, speakers’ turns are often multifunctional, that is they can contain more than one DA (i.e. “I’m Alex. Have we met before?” contains a ‘statement’, followed by a ‘question’). This work focuses on multifunctional DA tagging in Italian. First, we present iLISTEN2ISO, a novel resource with multifunctional DA annotation in Italian, created by annotating the iLISTEN corpus with the ISO standard. We provide an analysis of the corpus showing the importance of multifunctionality for DA tagging. Additionally, we train DA taggers for Italian on iLISTEN (achieving State of the Art results) and iLISTEN2ISO. Our findings indicate the importance of using a multifunctional approach for DA tagging.

The development of additive manufacturing techniques is allowing for the design of highly customised components with enhanced functionality in many application sectors. This paper describes the full aerothermal assessment of four novel hierarchically-layered fractal-like volumetric absorbers, designed to be employed in high temperature concentrating solar power applications. Absorbers are built by the lateral repetition of elementary cells on a 2D plane, which are arranged into constituent layers and stacked up following fractal growth patterns. They have been manufactured in stainless steel by selective laser melting. By fine tuning both the geometry of elementary cells and their growth patterns, the absorber porosity distribution can be tailored on a per-layer basis. This leads to optimised aft-shifted radiation absorption profiles and allows for the introduction of intricate convective heat transfer augmentation features. Experimental temperature measurements are presented which demonstrate that these variable porosity absorbers are able to generate and exploit volumetric effects, an advancement with respect to both monolithic honeycombs and isotropic foams. Solar-to-thermal conversion efficiencies, however, are shown to be of the same order as in those other receiver geometries. It is argued that the main reasons for this lie in the use of stainless steel, a material of relatively high reflectivity, and the predominantly low convective heat transfer rates found in the laminar flows established in these components.

We describe a compact fiber-optic probe (2 mm outside diameter) that utilizes spatially-resolved diffuse reflectance for tissue optical property recovery. Validation was performed in phantoms containing Intralipid 20% as scatterer, and methylene blue (MB), MnTPPS, and/or India ink as absorbers. Over a range of conditions, the reduced scattering coefficient was recovered with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.86-2.7 cm-1 (average error = 3.8%). MB concentration was recovered with RMSE = 0.26-0.52 µM (average error = 15.0%), which did not vary with inclusion of MnTPPS (p=0.65). This system will be utilized to determine optical properties in human abscesses, in order to generate treatment plans for photodynamic therapy.

Patients with haematopoietic disorders requiring long-term blood transfusions are at risk of iron overload. This study aimed to investigate the efficacy and safety of long-term deferasirox monotherapy in patients with transfusion-dependent anaemia in the routine clinical practice setting.This was a retrospective analysis of patients who commenced deferasirox therapy at the Hospital Bianchi Melacrino Morelli in Reggio Calabria, Italy. Data collected included cardiac and hepatic iron load (assessed by magnetic resonance imaging); left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF). Patients were divided into two groups for analysis: group A (baseline information collected prior to deferasirox initiation) and group B (baseline information collected after deferasirox initiation).Forty-six patients were included (group A: n=25; group B: n=21). The overall population was 63% male, with a mean age of 33 years. The majority of patients (65%) had thalassaemia major. In the overall population, cardiac iron levels between the baseline and first follow-up visits improved in both groups A and B (29.2 vs. 32.5 ms; p=0.04 and 28.4 vs. 31.4 ms; p=0.038). Liver iron levels improved significantly from baseline to visit 1 in group A (7.2 vs. 12.1 ms; p0.004) and from baseline to visit 3 (6.9 vs. 10.7; p=0.049) in group B. Generally, there was no correlation between cardiac and liver iron levels. LVEF remained stable throughout the study period. Deferasirox was well tolerated and was not associated with significant adverse events.Long-term treatment with deferasirox is effective and safe in patients with transfusion-dependent haemoglobinopathies monitored in the clinical practice setting.

Volumetric absorbers constitute one of the key elements in order to achieve high thermal conversion efficiencies in concentrating solar power plants. Regardless of the working fluid or thermodynamic cycle employed, design trends towards higher absorber output temperatures are widespread, which lead to the general need of components of high solar absorptance, high conduction within the receiver material, high internal convection, low radiative and convective heat losses and high mechanical durability. In this context, the use of advanced manufacturing techniques, such as selective laser melting, has allowed for the fabrication of intricate geometries that are capable of fulfilling the previous requirements. This paper presents a parametric design and analysis of the optical performance of volumetric absorbers of variable porosity conducted by means of detailed numerical ray tracing simulations. Sections of variable macroscopic porosity along the absorber depth were constructed by the fractal growth of single-cell structures. Measures of performance analyzed include optical reflection losses from the absorber front and rear faces, penetration of radiation inside the absorber volume, and radiation absorption as a function of absorber depth. The effects of engineering design parameters such as absorber length and wall thickness, material reflectance and porosity distribution on the optical performance of absorbers are discussed, and general design guidelines are given.