Learning Multi-Level Information for Dialogue Response Selection by Highway Recurrent Transformer

With the increasing research interest in dialogue response generation, there is an emerging branch formulating this task as selecting next sentences, where given the partial dialogue contexts, the goal is to determine the most probable next sentence. Following the recent success of the Transformer model, this paper proposes (1) a new variant of attention mechanism based on multi-head attention, called highway attention, and (2) a recurrent model based on transformer and the proposed highway attention, so-called Highway Recurrent Transformer. Experiments on the response selection task in the seventh Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC7) show the capability of the proposed model of modeling both utterance-level and dialogue-level information; the effectiveness of each module is further analyzed as well

A Stage For Social Comparison — The Value Of Information In Virtual Communities

Virtual communities have become significant applica tions for the Internet. Previous studies usually treated virtual communities as places for people to share and exchange information and did not explain the social value of comm unities well. This study treated a virtual community as a stage on which people can present themselves to other users while others can see the shows of people to satisfy their social comparison needs. Based on social co mparison theory, this paper investigated the effects of upward social comparison in virtual communiti es on user satisfaction through the mediations of perceived inspiration and self-improvement. Furthermore, these effects were moderated by individual social comparison orientation. The results of this study should enhance the understanding of the nature and the social value of information in virtual communities

Silver Metallization of Polyimide Surfaces Using EnvironmentallyFriendly Reducing Agents

Two environmentally friendly reducing agents, ascorbic acid and glucose, were employed to fabricate Ag-thin-film-coated polyimide(PI) films. Ascorbic acid is an acidic reducing agent, whereas glucose is an alkaline reducing agent. Both of these reducing agentsare capable of reducing Ag+ ions doped in poly(amic acid) (PAA) formed by hydrolysis of a PI surface. Only glucose can producea continuous and dense Ag thin film on a PAA surface. Granular and discontinuous Ag thin films were obtained when ascorbic acidwas employed as a reducing agent. This difference in reactivity is attributed to the pH values of these reducing solutions