Adversarial Connective-exploiting Networks for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

Implicit discourse relation classification is of great challenge due to the lack of connectives as strong linguistic cues, which motivates the use of annotated implicit connectives to improve the recognition. We propose a feature imitation framework in which an implicit relation network is driven to learn from another neural network with access to connectives, and thus encouraged to extract similarly salient features for accurate classification. We develop an adversarial model to enable an adaptive imitation scheme through competition between the implicit network and a rival feature discriminator. Our method effectively transfers discriminability of connectives to the implicit features, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the PDTB benchmark.Comment: To appear in ACL201

Innovative Credit Guarantee Schemes with Equity-for-Guarantee Swaps

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) faces much severer financial constraints compared to large companies and it is more vulnerable to market imperfection. To alleviate SMEs' financial constraints, Public Credit Guarantee Schemes (CGSs) have been introduced and widely used around the world. We first provide a thorough analysis of the effectiveness of the traditional CGSs and then introduce an innovative financing contract, referred to as equity-for-guarantee swap (EGS), with the aim of reducing SMEs' financial constraints in a more effective way. We show that EGS effectively reduces information asymmetry between lenders and SMEs and alleviates SMEs' severe financial constraints. We further investigate the impact of maturity on asset prices under EGS contract and analyse the value-at-risk (VAR) and expected shortfall (ES) of the insurer's risk exposure when participating in the EGS contract. Consistent with pecking order theory, an extension of our model shows that an SME tends to use equity financing first when it faces much severer financial constraints, then the SME issues more debt when it is less financially constrained

A new dabco-templated metal sulfate: 1,4-diazo­niabicyclo­[2.2.2]octane hexa­aqua­cadmium bis­(sulfate)

The title double mol­ecular salt, (C6H14N2)[Cd(H2O)6](SO4)2, is an isostructure of its Mn and Co analogues. The CdII atom adopts a near-regular CdO6 octa­hedral coordination geometry. The crystal structure can be described as an alternation of cationic and anionic layers along [010], and numerous O—H⋯O and N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds are observed. No thermal anomalies corresponding to possible phase transitions were observed in DSC (differential scanning calorimetry) measurements and the 93 K structure is almost the same as the room-temperature structure