Crowdsourcing Argumentation Structures in Chinese Hotel Reviews

Argumentation mining aims at automatically extracting the premises-claim discourse structures in natural language texts. There is a great demand for argumentation corpora for customer reviews. However, due to the controversial nature of the argumentation annotation task, there exist very few large-scale argumentation corpora for customer reviews. In this work, we novelly use the crowdsourcing technique to collect argumentation annotations in Chinese hotel reviews. As the first Chinese argumentation dataset, our corpus includes 4814 argument component annotations and 411 argument relation annotations, and its annotations qualities are comparable to some widely used argumentation corpora in other languages.Comment: 6 pages,3 figures,This article has been submitted to "The 2017 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC2017)

Using Argument-based Features to Predict and Analyse Review Helpfulness

We study the helpful product reviews identification problem in this paper. We observe that the evidence-conclusion discourse relations, also known as arguments, often appear in product reviews, and we hypothesise that some argument-based features, e.g. the percentage of argumentative sentences, the evidences-conclusions ratios, are good indicators of helpful reviews. To validate this hypothesis, we manually annotate arguments in 110 hotel reviews, and investigate the effectiveness of several combinations of argument-based features. Experiments suggest that, when being used together with the argument-based features, the state-of-the-art baseline features can enjoy a performance boost (in terms of F1) of 11.01\% in average.Comment: 6 pages, EMNLP201

Using Argument-based Features to Predict and Analyse Review Helpfulness

We study the helpful product reviews identification problem in this paper. We observe that the evidence-conclusion discourse relations, also known as arguments, often appear in product reviews, and we hypothesise that some argument-based features, e.g. the percentage of argumentative sentences, the evidences-conclusions ratios, are good indicators of helpful reviews. To validate this hypothesis, we manually annotate arguments in 110 hotel reviews, and investigate the effectiveness of several combinations of argument-based features. Experiments suggest that, when being used together with the argument-based features, the state-of-the-art baseline features can enjoy a performance boost (in terms of F1) of 11.01\% in average.Comment: 6 pages, EMNLP201

Science and Politics in China’s Official Water System: the Management of the Qiantang River (1927-1949)

Western water science and technology were introduced to upgrade China’s traditional water management methods and strategies during the Nanjing decade (1927-1937) under the Nationalist government. The engineering efforts expended to control the Qiantang River were typical examples of such initiatives. The primary strategy to protect areas surrounding the river from the destruction caused by the Qiantang bore was for centuries one of “passive defence”, with the construction of defensive seawalls featuring prominently among the methods used. However, the Qiantang tide consistently broke through these defences, and caused devastation. After 1927, while the old defensive methods were not completely discarded, more active strategies of river regulation were introduced, under the combined influence of Western methods, materials and expertise, and Western-trained Chinese engineers who stepped forward to tackle the problem. These activities were interrupted during the war years (1937-1945), but resumed again after the war. During the 22 years from 1927 to 1949, in four discrete stages, different technological solutions were devised, priorities identified, guidelines developed and strategies attempted, with each stage championed by a different engineer in charge. Gradually these efforts formed into what can be called the Qiantang River Project, a concerted effort to apply the knowledge of Western science and technology to change previous “passive defence” methods to “active governance” strategies for river regulation that combined both prevention and control. Efforts at each stage were influenced by factional struggles at the top of the government, and also affected by Western competition for Chinese interests. These developments were all part of the complex interaction of science and politics that took place in the management of the Qiantang River between 1927 and 1949

Joint RNN Model for Argument Component Boundary Detection

Argument Component Boundary Detection (ACBD) is an important sub-task in argumentation mining; it aims at identifying the word sequences that constitute argument components, and is usually considered as the first sub-task in the argumentation mining pipeline. Existing ACBD methods heavily depend on task-specific knowledge, and require considerable human efforts on feature-engineering. To tackle these problems, in this work, we formulate ACBD as a sequence labeling problem and propose a variety of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based methods, which do not use domain specific or handcrafted features beyond the relative position of the sentence in the document. In particular, we propose a novel joint RNN model that can predict whether sentences are argumentative or not, and use the predicted results to more precisely detect the argument component boundaries. We evaluate our techniques on two corpora from two different genres; results suggest that our joint RNN model obtain the state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, submitted to IEEE SMC 201

New Atomic Decompositions of Weighted Local Hardy Spaces

We introduce a new class of weighted local approximate atoms including classical weighted local atoms. Then we further obtain the weighted local approximate atomic decompositions of weighted local Hardy spaces $h_{\omega} ^p(R^n)$ with $0<p\leq 1$ and weight $\omega\in A_1(R^n)$. As an application, we prove the boundedness of inhomogeneous Calder\'on-Zygmund operators on $h_{\omega}^p(R^n)$ via weighted local approximate atoms and molecules

Groundwater overexploitation in the North China Plain: A path to sustainability

Over-pumping of aquifers is a worldwide problem, mainly caused by agricultural water use. Among its consequences are the falling dry of streams and wetlands, soil subsidence, die-off of phreatophytic vegetation, saline water intrusion, increased pumping cost and loss of storage needed for drought relief. Stopping or reversing the trend requires management interventions. The North China Plain serves as an example. A management system is set up for a typical county. It contains three components: monitoring, decision support based on modelling, and implementation in the field. Besides all monitoring data, the decision support module contains an irrigation calculator, a box model, and a distributed groundwater model to project the outcomes of different water allocation scenarios. In view of grain security, a solution combines an adaptation of the cropping system with imports of surface water from the South. The Open Access book does not only describe the problem and the path to its solution. It also gives access to nine manuals concerning methods used. They include computer programs and the game Save the Water. The Chinese experience should be of considerable interest to other regions in the world which suffer from over-pumping of aquifers

The Reverse Hölder Inequality for the Solution to p-Harmonic Type System

Some inequalities to A-harmonic equation A(x,du)=d∗v have been proved. The A-harmonic equation is a particular form of p-harmonic type system A(x,a+du)=b+d∗v only when a=0 and b=0. In this paper, we will prove the Poincaré inequality and the reverse Hölder inequality for the solution to the p-harmonic type system

Singlino-dominated dark matter in general NMSSM

The general Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) describes the singlino-dominated dark-matter (DM) property by four independent parameters: singlet-doublet Higgs coupling coefficient $\lambda$, Higgsino mass $\mu_{tot}$, DM mass $m_{\tilde{\chi}_1^0}$, and singlet Higgs self-coupling coefficient $\kappa$. The first three parameters strongly influence the DM-nucleon scattering rate, while $\kappa$ usually affects the scattering only slightly. This characteristic implies that singlet-dominated particles may form a secluded DM sector. Under such a theoretical structure, the DM achieves the correct abundance by annihilating into a pair of singlet-dominated Higgs bosons by adjusting $\kappa$'s value. Its scattering with nucleons is suppressed when $\lambda v/\mu_{tot}$ is small. This speculation is verified by sophisticated scanning of the theory's parameter space with various experiment constraints considered. In addition, the Bayesian evidence of the general NMSSM and that of $Z_3$-NMSSM is computed. It is found that, at the cost of introducing one additional parameter, the former is approximately $3.3 \times 10^3$ times the latter. This result corresponds to Jeffrey's scale of 8.05 and implies that the considered experiments strongly prefer the general NMSSM to the $Z_3$-NMSSM.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figure