Word segmentation is an essential and challenging task in natural language processing, especially for the Chinese language due to its high linguistic complexity. Existing methods for Chinese word segmentation, including statistical machine learning methods and neural network methods, usually have good performance in specific knowledge domains. Given the increasing importance of interdisciplinary and cross-domain studies, one of the challenges in cross-domain word segmentation is to handle the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. Existing methods show unsatisfactory performance to meet the practical standard. To this end, we propose a document-level context-aware model that can automatically perceive and identify OOV words from different domains. Our method jointly implements a word-based and a character-based model and then processes the results with a newly proposed reconstruction model. We evaluate the new method by designing and conducting comprehensive experiments on two real-world datasets (e.g., news from different domains). The results demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art models in handling texts from different domains. Importantly, when doing the word segmentation under the cross-domain scenario, our proposed method can improve the performance of OOV words recognition.
The mammalian proprotein convertase furin has been found to play an important role in diverse physiological and pathological events, such as the activation of viral glycoproteins and bacterial exotoxins. Small, non-toxic and highly active, furin inhibitors are considered to be attractive drug candidates for diseases caused by virus and bacteria. In this study, a series of peptide inhibitors were designed and synthesized based on the C-terminal fragment of histone H1.2, which has an inhibitory effect on furin. Replacing the reactive site of inhibitors with the consensus substrate recognition sequence of furin has been found to increase inhibitory activity greatly. The most potent inhibitor, I4, with 14 amino acid residues has a Ki value of 17 nM for furin. Although most of the synthesized peptides were temporary inhibitors, the inhibitor I5, with nine amino acids, retained its full potency, even after a 3 h incubation period with furin at 37 degrees C. These inhibitors may potentially lead to the development of anti-viral and anti-bacterial drug compounds.
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