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The samovar emerges in different forms in many countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and Turkey. The history of the samovar is based on pots used in the preparation of herbal medicines which have the therapeutic properties in China due to their functional similarity, and even to the ancient Greek and Roman water heating vessels. History of the oldest known Russian samovar is dated with XVIII. century, so the period of Peter the Great. The samovar is one of the basic cultural elements that have become a symbol of Russian society and the process of its inclusion in the life of the Russian people began as a result of the meeting of tea culture in China with Soviet lands. It is seen frequently giving place to the image of the samovar in Russian folk tales, literary works, songs, proverbs, films as a folkloric element. Today, as well as being used as a tea brewing machine, the samovar also shows itself among the decorative products and souvenirs. In this study, the history of the samovar, the place of the samovar in Russian culture, the characteristics of Russian samovar, the Russian cities famous for its samovar product, the samovar museums in Russia, etc. issues will be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entity linking is one of the problems to be handled in order to process natural language and to enrich the existing unstructured text with metadata. The generation of assignments between knowledge base entities and lexical units is called entity linking. Although a number of systems have been proposed for linking entity mentions in various languages, there is currently no publicly available entity linking system specific to the Turkish language. This paper presents a novel entity linking system—THINKER - for linking Turkish content with entities defined in the Turkish dictionary (tdk.gov.tr) or Turkish Wikipedia (tr.wikipedia.org). Specifically, we first propose a novel machine learning based entity detection algorithm for the Turkish language. Then, we propose a collective disambiguation algorithm which utilizes a set of metrics for the linking task and, which is optimized using a genetic algorithm. The effectiveness of THINKER is validated empirically over generated data sets. The experimental results show that THINKER outperformed the state-of-the-art cross-lingual and multilingual entity linking systems in the literature. High entity linking performance (74.81 percent F1 score) is achieved by extending previous methods with some features specific to Turkish language and by developing a novel method that can learn better representations of entity embeddings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Entity-linking systems link noun phrase mentions in a text to their corresponding knowledge base entities in order to enrich a text with metadata. Wikipedia is a popular and comprehensive knowledge base that is widely used in entity-linking systems. However, long-tail entities are not popular enough to have their own Wikipedia articles. Therefore, a knowledge base created by using Wikipedia entities would be limited to only popular entities. In order to overcome the knowledge base coverage limitation of Wikipedia-based entity-linking systems, this paper presents an entity-discovery system that can detect semantic types of entities that are not defined in Wikipedia. The effectiveness of the proposed system was validated empirically through the use of generated data sets for the Turkish language. The experimental results show that, in terms of accuracy, our system performs competitively in comparison to the previous methods in the literature. Its high performance is achieved through a method that learns word embeddings for candidate entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational timetabling problem is a challenging real world problem which has been of interest to many researchers and practitioners. There are many variants of this problem which mainly require scheduling of events and resources under various constraints. In this study, a curriculum based course timetabling problem at Yeditepe University is described and an iterative selection hyper-heuristic is presented as a solution method. A selection hyper-heuristic as a high level methodology operates on the space formed by a fixed set of low level heuristics which operate directly on the space of solutions. The move acceptance and heuristic selection methods are the main components of a selection hyper-heuristic. The proposed hyper-heuristic in this study combines a simulated annealing move acceptance method with a learning heuristic selection method and manages a set of low level constraint oriented heuristics. A key goal in hyper-heuristic research is to build low cost methods which are general and can be reused on unseen problem instances as well as other problem domains desirably with no additional human expert intervention. Hence, the proposed method is additionally applied to a high school timetabling problem, as well as six other problem domains from a hyper-heuristic benchmark to test its level of generality. The empirical results show that our easy-to-implement hyper-heuristic is effective in solving the Yeditepe course timetabling problem. Moreover, being sufficiently general, it delivers a reasonable performance across different problem domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

: BackgroundHyaluronic acid and its derivatives have become increasingly popular for preventing adhesions in primary tendon repair. Their use in tenolysis, however, has not been established yet. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the efficacy of Seprafilm®, a combination of carboxymethylcellulose membrane and hyaluronate, in prevention of adhesion formation after tenolysis.: Materials and methodsThirty chickens were initially operated on their right central toes in order to constitute an experimental setting of postoperative flexor tendon adhesion. They were then randomly assigned to 3 groups at 6 weeks. Group 1 received no further procedure, group 2 underwent simple tenolysis with physiologic saline injection, and group 3 had tenolysis with Seprafilm® interposition.: ResultsGroup 3 scored a significantly higher average gliding excursion value than the other groups. Histologic examination corroborated the biomechanical data.: ConclusionSeprafilm® was effective in preventing adhesions after tenolysis. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]