Articulating Teachers’ Expectations afore: Impact of Rubrics on Chinese EFL Learners’ Self-Assessment and Speaking Ability

Under the constraint of classroom time, English as foreign language (EFL) learners usually do not have adequate opportunity to practice oral English in class nor receive individualized feedback from the instructor. After-class practice constitutes an essential component of foreign language learning. This study investigated the effect of utilizing rubrics on EFL learners’ oral English using a 16-week experiment and a questionnaire. A total of 61 college students participated in the study, 41 in the rubric-mediated group and 20 in the control group. They were required to complete six tasks of three types: conversation, description, and discussion. Participants in the rubric-mediated group were provided with three rubrics describing respective task assessment criteria. They were also required to record their speaking, self-assess their performance with reference to the rubrics, revise their speaking if they noticed they did not meet the criteria, and finally complete a questionnaire. Students in the control group were assigned the same tasks but were not given the rubrics. Two oral tests were delivered at the initial and final stages of the study to measure the change in their speaking ability. Results revealed that rubrics had positive effects on discourse length, discourse organization, and linguistic flexibility but little impact on linguistic accuracy. Responses to the questionnaire indicated that students perceive rubrics as a facilitative tool of practice and self-assessment

Voice Conversion Based on Cross-Domain Features Using Variational Auto Encoders

An effective approach to non-parallel voice conversion (VC) is to utilize deep neural networks (DNNs), specifically variational auto encoders (VAEs), to model the latent structure of speech in an unsupervised manner. A previous study has confirmed the ef- fectiveness of VAE using the STRAIGHT spectra for VC. How- ever, VAE using other types of spectral features such as mel- cepstral coefficients (MCCs), which are related to human per- ception and have been widely used in VC, have not been prop- erly investigated. Instead of using one specific type of spectral feature, it is expected that VAE may benefit from using multi- ple types of spectral features simultaneously, thereby improving the capability of VAE for VC. To this end, we propose a novel VAE framework (called cross-domain VAE, CDVAE) for VC. Specifically, the proposed framework utilizes both STRAIGHT spectra and MCCs by explicitly regularizing multiple objectives in order to constrain the behavior of the learned encoder and de- coder. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CD- VAE framework outperforms the conventional VAE framework in terms of subjective tests.Comment: Accepted to ISCSLP 201

Exact Master Equation for Quantum Brownian Motion with Generalization to Momentum-Dependent System-Environment Couplings

In this paper, we generalize the quantum Brownian motion to include momentum-dependent system-environment couplings. The conventional QBM model corresponds to the spacial case $W_k = V_k$. The generalized QBM is more complicated but the generalization is necessary. This is because the particle transition and the pair production between the system and the environment represent two very different physical processes, and usually cannot have the same coupling strengths. Thus, the conventional QBM model, which is well-defined at classical level, is hardly realized in real quantum physical world. We discuss the physical realizations of the generalized QBM in different physical systems, and derive its exact master equation for both the initial decoupled states and initial correlated states. The Hu-Paz-Zhang master equation of the conventional QBM model is reproduced as a special case. We find that the renormalized Brownian particle Hamiltonian after traced out all the environmental states induced naturally a momentum-dependent potential, which also shows the necessity of including the momentum-dependent coupling in the QBM Hamiltonian. In the Hu-Paz-Zhang master equation, such a renormalized potential is misplaced so that the correct renormalization Hamiltonian has not been found. With the exact master equation for both the initial decoupled and and initial correlated states, the issues about the initial jolt which is a long-stand problem in the Hu-Paz-Zhang master equation is also re-examined. We find that the so-called "initial jolt", which has been thought to be an artificial effect due to the use of the initial decoupled system-environment states, has nothing do to with the initial decoupled state. The new exact master equation for the generalized QBM also has the potential applications to photonics quantum computing

Study of the Basic Characteristics of an Interactive TV Service

The iTV service was too conceptually nebulous to readily comprehend. It was variously mistaken as referring to a network television service and a digital television service. To avoid further setbacks, it is very important that we clarify the basic characteristics of iTV service for the benefit of the fields of information technology, MIS, broadcasting, commerce and so on. After conducting literature reviews and interviews, we were able to delineate the basic characteristics of iTV service as follows:1. The contents of iTV service; 2.The supply and use process, and components of the iTV service

Aqua­[6-carboxyl­ato-N′-(pyridin-2-yl­methyl­idene)pyridine-2-carbohydrazidato]copper(II) trihydrate

In the title compound, [Cu(C13H8N4O3)(H2O)]·3H2O, the complex molecule, except for the aqua ligand, is essentially planar [r.m.s. deviation = 0.034 (2) Å]. The coordination polyhedron of the Cu2+ cation is a square-pyramid, with the aqua ligand at the apex. The compound exhibits a three-dimensional structure, which is is stabilized by O—H⋯O and O—-H⋯N hydrogen bonds and π–π inter­actions [centroid–centroid distance = 2.987 (3) Å]