Order-Preserving Abstractive Summarization for Spoken Content Based on Connectionist Temporal Classification

Connectionist temporal classification (CTC) is a powerful approach for sequence-to-sequence learning, and has been popularly used in speech recognition. The central ideas of CTC include adding a label "blank" during training. With this mechanism, CTC eliminates the need of segment alignment, and hence has been applied to various sequence-to-sequence learning problems. In this work, we applied CTC to abstractive summarization for spoken content. The "blank" in this case implies the corresponding input data are less important or noisy; thus it can be ignored. This approach was shown to outperform the existing methods in term of ROUGE scores over Chinese Gigaword and MATBN corpora. This approach also has the nice property that the ordering of words or characters in the input documents can be better preserved in the generated summaries.Comment: Accepted by Interspeech 201

Testing Technicolor Models via Top Quark Pair Production in High Energy Photon Collisions

Pseudo-Goldstone boson contributions to $t\bar{t}$ production rates in technicolor models with and without topcolor at the $\sqrt{s}=0.5 and 1.5$ TeV photon colliders and hadron colliders are reviewed. For reasonable ranges of the parameters, the contributions are large enough to be experimentally observable. Models with topcolor, without topcolor and the MSSM with $\tan\beta\geq 1$ can be experimentally distinguished.Comment: Talk given by H.Y. Zhou at the III International Conference on Hyperons,Charm and Beauty Hadrons,Genova,Italy,June 30-July 3 199

Mixed Spices at Culinary Doses Have Prebiotic Effects in Healthy Adults: A Pilot Study.

Spices were used as food preservatives prior to the advent of refrigeration, suggesting the possibility of effects on microbiota. Previous studies have shown prebiotic activities in animals and in vitro, but there has not been a demonstration of prebiotic or postbiotic effects at culinary doses in humans. In this randomized placebo-controlled study, we determined in twenty-nine healthy adults the effects on the gut microbiota of the consumption daily of capsules containing 5 g of mixed spices at culinary doses by comparison to a matched control group consuming a maltodextrin placebo capsule. The 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing data were used for microbial characterization. Spice consumption resulted in a significant reduction in Firmicutes abundance (p < 0.033) and a trend of enrichment in Bacteroidetes (p < 0.097) compared to placebo group. Twenty-six operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were different between the spice and placebo groups after intervention. Furthermore, there was a significant negative correlation between fecal short-chain fatty acid propionate concentration and Firmicutes abundance in spice intervention group (p < 0.04). The production of individual fecal short-chain fatty acid was not significantly changed by spice consumption in this study. Mixed spices consumption significantly modified gut microbiota, suggesting a prebiotic effect of spice consumption at culinary doses