Conversational Emotion Analysis via Attention Mechanisms

Different from the emotion recognition in individual utterances, we propose a multimodal learning framework using relation and dependencies among the utterances for conversational emotion analysis. The attention mechanism is applied to the fusion of the acoustic and lexical features. Then these fusion representations are fed into the self-attention based bi-directional gated recurrent unit (GRU) layer to capture long-term contextual information. To imitate real interaction patterns of different speakers, speaker embeddings are also utilized as additional inputs to distinguish the speaker identities during conversational dialogs. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct experiments on the IEMOCAP database. Experimental results demonstrate that our method shows absolute 2.42% performance improvement over the state-of-the-art strategies

Orthogonality catastrophe and quantum speed limit for dynamical quantum phase transition

We investigate the orthogonality catastrophe and quantum speed limit in the Creutz model for dynamical quantum phase transitions. We demonstrate that exact zeros of the Loschmidt echo can exist in finite-size systems for specific discrete values. We highlight the role of the zero-energy mode when analyzing quench dynamics near the critical point. We also examine the behavior of the time for the first exact zeros of the Loschmidt echo and the corresponding quantum speed limit time as the system size increases. While the bound is not tight, it can be attributed to the scaling properties of the band gap and energy variance with respect to system size. As such, we establish a relation between the orthogonality catastrophe and quantum speed limit by referencing the full form of the Loschmidt echo. Significantly, we find the possibility of using the quantum speed limit to detect the critical point of a static quantum phase transition, along with a decrease in the amplitude of noise induced quantum speed limit.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

Study on the layered dusty plasma structures in the summer polar mesopause

Traditional hydrodynamic equations are adopted to build a one-dimensional theoretical model to study the effect of gravity wave on layered dusty plasma structures formation and evolution near the polar summer mesospause region associated with polar mesosphere summer echoes (PMSE). The proposed mechanism gives consideration to the charged ice particle motion by the gravity wave modulation, making a significant contribution to the vertical transport of heavy ice particles and convergence into thin layers. And numerical results show that the pattern of the multi-layer structure depends on the ration of the initial ice particles density distribution to the vertical wavelength of the gravity waves, the ice particle size and the wind velocity caused by gravity wave. Also, the variation of ion density distribution under the influence of gravity wave has also been examined. Finally, the electron density depletions (bite-outs) layers has been simulated according to the charge conservation laws, and the results are compared to the ECT02 rocket sounding data, which agree well with the measuring

Impact of the Number of Dissected Lymph Nodes on Survival for Gastric Cancer after Distal Subtotal Gastrectomy

Objectives. To investigate the prognostic impact of the number of dissected lymph nodes (LNs) in gastric cancer after curative distal gastrectomy. Methods. The survival of 634 patients who underwent curative distal gastrectomy from 1995 to 2004 was retrieved. Long-term surgical outcomes and associations between the number of dissected LNs and the 5-year survival rate were investigated. Results. The number of dissected LNs was one of the most important prognostic indicators. Among patients with comparable T category, the larger the number of dissected LNs was, the better the survival would be (P < 0.05). The linear regression showed that a significant survival improvement based on increasing retrieved LNs for stage II, III and IV (P < 0.05). A cut-point analysis yields the greatest variance of survival rate difference at the levels of 15 LNs (stage I), 25 LNs (stage II) and 30 LNs (stage III). Conclusion. The number of dissected LNs is an independent prognostic factor for gastric cancer. To improve the long-term survival of patients with gastric cancer, removing at least 15 LNs for stage I, 25 LNs for stage II, and 30 LNs for stage III patients during curative distal gastrectomy is recommended

Acoustic meta-stethoscope for cardiac auscultation

Straight cylindrical stethoscopes serve as an important alternative to conventional stethoscopes whose application in the treatment of infectious diseases might be limited by the use of protective clothing. Yet their miniaturization is challenging due to the low-frequency of bioacoustics signal. Here, we design and experimentally implement a meta-stethoscope with subwavelength size, simple fabrication, easy assembly yet high sensitivity, which simply comprises multiple round perforated plate units and a cylindrical shell. We elucidate our proposed mechanism by analytically deriving the frequency response equation, which proves that the equivalent acoustic propagation path is substantially increased by the high-index metamaterial, enabling downscaling of the meta-stethoscope to subwavelength footprint. The acoustic performance of meta-stethoscope is experimentally characterized by monitoring the cardiac auscultation on clothed human body. The simulated and measured results agree well, with both showing the expected enhancement of sensitivity of our proposed meta-stethoscope (~ 10 dB) within the predicted working frequency range from 80 to 130 Hz despite its compactness and simplicity. Our designed portable, detachable yet effective meta-stethoscope opens a route to metamaterial-enabled stethoscope paradigm, with potential applications in diverse scenarios such as medical diagnosis and acoustic sensing.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure