Exploiting Contextual Information for Prosodic Event Detection Using Auto-Context

Prosody and prosodic boundaries carry significant information regarding linguistics and paralinguistics and are important aspects of speech. In the field of prosodic event detection, many local acoustic features have been investigated; however, contextual information has not yet been thoroughly exploited. The most difficult aspect of this lies in learning the long-distance contextual dependencies effectively and efficiently. To address this problem, we introduce the use of an algorithm called auto-context. In this algorithm, a classifier is first trained based on a set of local acoustic features, after which the generated probabilities are used along with the local features as contextual information to train new classifiers. By iteratively using updated probabilities as the contextual information, the algorithm can accurately model contextual dependencies and improve classification ability. The advantages of this method include its flexible structure and the ability of capturing contextual relationships. When using the auto-context algorithm based on support vector machine, we can improve the detection accuracy by about 3% and F-score by more than 7% on both two-way and four-way pitch accent detections in combination with the acoustic context. For boundary detection, the accuracy improvement is about 1% and the F-score improvement reaches 12%. The new algorithm outperforms conditional random fields, especially on boundary detection in terms of F-score. It also outperforms an n-gram language model on the task of pitch accent detection

How Extreme Events in China Would Be Affected by Global Warming-Insights From a Bias-Corrected CMIP6 Ensemble

In recent years, concurrent climate extreme conditions (i.e., hot-dry, cold-dry, hot-wet, and cold-wet) have led to various unprecedented natural disasters (e.g., floods, landslide, wildfire, droughts, etc.), causing significant damages to human societies and ecosystems. This is especially true for China where many unprecedented natural disasters have been reported due to the recent warming in local climate. In this paper, we focus on the issue of ultra-extreme events (1‰ threshold) and address how future global warming would affect the climate extreme conditions in China. Specifically, to reduce the uncertainties from models, we use a downscaled and bias-corrected CMIP6 ensemble under two continuously-warming scenarios to evaluate the impact of global warming on ultra-extreme events over China. The results show that, under both SSP245 and SSP585 scenarios, extreme hot conditions would become dominant in most regions of China and some regions are likely to experience over 50 extreme hot days at future warming levels. The frequency of extreme cold events is projected to be small. More frequent extreme hot-wet events with concurrence in the same month and year would be expected for China under the continuously-warming scenarios. This is particularly obvious for the west where more than 6 hot-wet months are likely to take place under future warming scenarios. This may imply that more extreme heat waves and flooding events would coincide in the same month or year for China in the future. For univariate ultra-extreme events, both extreme hot events and extreme wet events would drop by above 25% from 2.0°C to 1.5°C global warming level, particularly under the SSP245 scenario. When the global mean temperature is limited to 1.5°C rather than 2°C, the avoided impacts of hot-wet and cold-wet extremes concurring in the same month will be larger than those of dry-related compound extremes. Overall, the results suggest that slowing down global warming can reduce the frequency of concurrent climate extreme conditions in China, highlighting the importance of immediate action toward carbon emission reduction

The Equivalent Thermal Parameter Model and Simulation of Air Conditioner System in Demand Response Programs

AbstractEstimating end-use energy consumption that accurately reflects the variance of the end-load is critical for the grid wise simulation and analysis work. In a house, the largest load with a thermal cycle is often the heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system. So the thermal dynamics of typical residential electric air conditioner is discussed, and then an equivalent thermal parameters (ETP) model is built by the thermal equilibrium in this paper. Based on this, the switch status, indoor air temperature and power consumption are simulated through control strategies of constant thermostat set point. The results show according the switch status, indoor air temperature can be calculated by the ETP model, thus give the desire status to the grid according the setting temperature. In summer, with the increasing of setting temperature, the frequency of on-off becomes lower, thus the power consumption also reduces from 1200kW (26°C) to 970kW (27°C). So if some control strategies are used, the model will play an important part on decreasing the peak-average rate of the power grid and also improving the load rate of grid

The state of the Martian climate

60°N was +2.0°C, relative to the 1981–2010 average value (Fig. 5.1). This marks a new high for the record. The average annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for 2016 for land stations north of starting in 1900, and is a significant increase over the previous highest value of +1.2°C, which was observed in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Average global annual temperatures also showed record values in 2015 and 2016. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes

EST–SSR marker development and transcriptome sequencing analysis of different tissues of Korean pine (Pinus koraiensis Sieb. et Zucc.)

Korean pine is a gymnosperm, and gymnosperms have relatively large genome sequences and lack a model organism reference genome. Understanding the important gene expression in the tissue growth process of needles (T1), stems (T2), female flowers (T3) and cones (T4) of the Korean pine is necessary to develop and compound the enzyme genes related to secondary metabolite synthesis. Simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were explored based on the expressed sequence tag (EST). High-throughput sequencing technology was used to compare and analyse transcriptomes of four different tissue parts of the Korean pine, yielding many differentially expressed unigene sequences. Fluorescently labelled SSR primers were designed to analyse the polymorphism level of 60 open-pollinated families from the Heilongjiang province of China. The research showed that (1) 21.3 GB of data was obtained from the transcriptome sequencing, and 41,476 candidate unigenes were identified based on sequence annotation using various databases. Clusters from orthologous groups and gene ontology function classification tools were used to divide the annotated transcript sequences into 56 functional categories. (2) Cones had the highest number of expressed genes during puberty, with rich expression as they were being formed. (3) By pathway enrichment analysis, 16 key enzyme genes related to fatty acid synthesis in other homologous species were obtained. (4) Ten novel polymorphic fluorescence labelling were used to identify 60 open-pollinated families with a medium polymorphism level. The research showed that high-throughput sequencing technology could analyse the transcriptome expression level between different organisms, and SSR markers were successfully developed

Analysis of the Mechanical and Preforming Behaviors of Carbon-Kevlar Hybrid Woven Reinforcement

Carbon-Kevlar hybrid reinforcement is increasingly used in the domains that have both strength and anti-impact requirements. However, the research on the preforming behaviors of hybrid reinforcement is very limited. This paper aims to investigate the mechanical and preforming behaviors of carbon-Kevlar hybrid reinforcement. The results show that carbon-Kevlar hybrid woven reinforcement presents a unique “double-peak” tensile behavior, which is significantly different from that of single fiber type reinforcement, and the in-plane shear deformation demonstrates its large in-plane shear deformability. Both the tensile and in-plane shear behaviors present insensitivity to loading rate. In the preforming process, yarn slippage and out-of-plane yarn buckling are the two primary types of defects. Locations of these defects are closely related to the punch shape and the initial yarn direction. These defects cannot be alleviated or removed by just increasing the blank holder pressure. In the multi-layer preforming, the compaction between the plies and the friction between yarns simultaneously affect the quality of final preforms. The defect location of multi-layer preforms is the same as that of single-layer, while its defect range is much wider. The results found in this paper could provide useful guidance for the engineering application and preforming modeling of hybrid woven reinforcement

Tribological properties of NiAl-based composites containing Ag3VO4 nanoparticles at elevated temperatures

In order to improve the tribological properties of NiAl intermetallic, Ag3VO4 nanoparticles with a size of 100-200 nm were synthesized by hydrothermal method and NiAl/Ag3VO4 composites were successfully prepared by mechanical alloying and sintering technique. The composition and microstructure of milled powders and sintered composites were characterized and the tribological properties were evaluated. The results showed that NiAl-based composites were consisted of B2 ordered NiAl matrix and metallic Ag/vanadium oxide precipitates, which were formed by the decomposition of silver vanadate. Wear testing results indicated that NiAl-based composites containing silver vanadate exhibited superior tribological properties at elevated temperatures. Subsequently, Raman results demonstrated that the reproduction of silver vanadate was responsible for the improvement of tribological properties at elevated temperatures. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Progress of Continuous Lubricating Materials over a Wide Temperature Range

The lubrication and wear performance of moving parts under extreme harsh conditions in the area of modern aviation, aerospace,nuclear power and other high-tech industries closely affect the reliability and lifetime of the entire system, thus the need for the new solid lubricant materials with excellent continuous lubricating behaviors over a wide temperature range becomes more increasingly urgent. Self-lubricating composites, "sweating" lubricating material, PS/ PM self-lubricating coating and temperature "adaptive" lubricating materials were revised in this paper, including the basis of the selection of lubricants and their mixture. Furthermore,the effects of new lubricant on the microstructure, tribological action, tribo-reaction and lubricating mechanism of continuous lubricating material over a wide temperature range were researched. Additionally, the continuous lubricating materials containing different lubricant systems are also summarized and the development trends of the materials over a wide temperature range are proposed