215 research outputs found
Improving Mandarin Prosodic Structure Prediction with Multi-level Contextual Information
For text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, prosodic structure prediction (PSP) plays
an important role in producing natural and intelligible speech. Although
inter-utterance linguistic information can influence the speech interpretation
of the target utterance, previous works on PSP mainly focus on utilizing
intrautterance linguistic information of the current utterance only. This work
proposes to use inter-utterance linguistic information to improve the
performance of PSP. Multi-level contextual information, which includes both
inter-utterance and intrautterance linguistic information, is extracted by a
hierarchical encoder from character level, utterance level and discourse level
of the input text. Then a multi-task learning (MTL) decoder predicts prosodic
boundaries from multi-level contextual information. Objective evaluation
results on two datasets show that our method achieves better F1 scores in
predicting prosodic word (PW), prosodic phrase (PPH) and intonational phrase
(IPH). It demonstrates the effectiveness of using multi-level contextual
information for PSP. Subjective preference tests also indicate the naturalness
of synthesized speeches are improved.Comment: Accepted by Interspeech202
Learning Disentangled Semantic Representations for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer in Multilingual Machine Reading Comprehension
Multilingual pre-trained models are able to zero-shot transfer knowledge from
rich-resource to low-resource languages in machine reading comprehension (MRC).
However, inherent linguistic discrepancies in different languages could make
answer spans predicted by zero-shot transfer violate syntactic constraints of
the target language. In this paper, we propose a novel multilingual MRC
framework equipped with a Siamese Semantic Disentanglement Model (SSDM) to
disassociate semantics from syntax in representations learned by multilingual
pre-trained models. To explicitly transfer only semantic knowledge to the
target language, we propose two groups of losses tailored for semantic and
syntactic encoding and disentanglement. Experimental results on three
multilingual MRC datasets (i.e., XQuAD, MLQA, and TyDi QA) demonstrate the
effectiveness of our proposed approach over models based on mBERT and XLM-100.
Code is available at:https://github.com/wulinjuan/SSDM_MRC.Comment: Accepted to ACL 2022 (main conference
Hypoglycemic activity and the activation of phosphorylation of a triterpenoid-rich extract from Euryale shell on streptozotocin-induced diabetic mice
In the present study, we examined the hypoglycemic properties and the effective mechanisms of a triterpenoid-rich extract from the Euryale shell (ES) in streptozotocin-induced (STZ) diabetic mice. The hydroalcoholic extract of ES (200, 400 and 600 mg/kg/day) was orally administered to STZ-diabetic mice for 4 weeks. We observed that in the liver of diabetic mice, the ES extract caused a sharp reduction in the gene expression of protein tyrosine phosphatase-1B (PTP1B) but induced the gene expression of phosphatidyl-inositol-3-kinase (PI-3K) and protein kinase B (PKB) compared with that of untreated diabetic mice. Additionally, a significant increase in the phosphorylation of the PKB protein was observed (p<0.01). This was corroborated by the inhibition of PTP1B and by the regulation of glucose uptake via PI-3K activation, which together demonstrate that the reduction of PTP1B can modulate key insulin signaling events downstream of the insulin receptor.
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Sprouty genes regulate activated fibroblasts in mammary epithelial development and breast cancer.
Stromal fibroblasts are a major stem cell niche component essential for organ formation and cancer development. Fibroblast heterogeneity, as revealed by recent advances in single-cell techniques, has raised important questions about the origin, differentiation, and function of fibroblast subtypes. In this study, we show in mammary stromal fibroblasts that loss of the receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) negative feedback regulators encoded by Spry1, Spry2, and Spry4 causes upregulation of signaling in multiple RTK pathways and increased extracellular matrix remodeling, resulting in accelerated epithelial branching. Single-cell transcriptomic analysis demonstrated that increased production of FGF10 due to Sprouty (Spry) loss results from expansion of a functionally distinct subgroup of fibroblasts with the most potent branching-promoting ability. Compared to their three independent lineage precursors, fibroblasts in this subgroup are activated, as they are located immediately adjacent to the epithelium that is actively undergoing branching and invasion. Spry genes are downregulated, and activated fibroblasts are expanded, in all three of the major human breast cancer subtypes. Together, our data highlight the regulation of a functional subtype of mammary fibroblasts by Spry genes and their essential role in epithelial morphogenesis and cancer development
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