Playing crucial roles in various cellular processes, such as recognition of specific nucleotide sequences, regulation of transcription, and regulation of gene expression, DNA-binding proteins are essential ingredients for both eukaryotic and prokaryotic proteomes. With the avalanche of protein sequences generated in the postgenomic age, it is a critical challenge to develop automated methods for accurate and rapidly identifying DNA-binding proteins based on their sequence information alone. Here, a novel predictor, called “iDNA-Prot|dis”, was established by incorporating the amino acid distance-pair coupling information and the amino acid reduced alphabet profile into the general pseudo amino acid composition (PseAAC) vector. The former can capture the characteristics of DNA-binding proteins so as to enhance its prediction quality, while the latter can reduce the dimension of PseAAC vector so as to speed up its prediction process. It was observed by the rigorous jackknife and independent dataset tests that the new predictor outperformed the existing predictors for the same purpose. As a user-friendly web-server, iDNA-Prot|dis is accessible to the public at http://bioinformatics.hitsz.edu.cn/iDNA-Prot_dis/. Moreover, for the convenience of the vast majority of experimental scientists, a step-by-step protocol guide is provided on how to use the web-server to get their desired results without the need to follow the complicated mathematic equations that are presented in this paper just for the integrity of its developing process. It is anticipated that the iDNA-Prot|dis predictor may become a useful high throughput tool for large-scale analysis of DNA-binding proteins, or at the very least, play a complementary role to the existing predictors in this regard.

For users' convenience, the source code of generating the profile-based proteins and the multiple kernel learning was also provided at http://bioinformatics.hitsz.edu.cn/main/~binliu/remote/

Stance classification, which aims at detecting the stance expressed in text towards a specific target, is an emerging problem in sentiment analysis. A major difference between stance classification and traditional aspect-level sentiment classification is that the identification of stance is dependent on target which might not be explicitly mentioned in text. This indicates that apart from text content, the target information is important to stance detection. To this end, we propose a neural network-based model, which incorporates target-specific information into stance classification by following a novel attention mechanism. In specific, the attention mechanism is expected to locate the critical parts of text which are related to target. Our evaluations on both the English and Chinese Stance Detection datasets show that the proposed model achieves the state-of-theart performance.

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