Language Transformation in Interpretation Between Chinese and English

There exist huge differences between Chinese and English, particularly in terms of syntactic structures. In order to have a good transformation between these two languages, interpreters should know the differences and apply the knowledge in the interpretation process. With specific examples, this paper explores the differences between these two languages in the following aspects: hypotaxis in English Vs. parataxis in Chinese; subject-prominent structure in English Vs. topic-prominent structure in Chinese; Preposition of modifiers in Chinese Vs. Postposition of modifiers in English; passive voice in English Vs. active voice in Chinese; compound sentences and complex sentences; cultural context differences between English and Chinese.

Multimodal Interactivity and Brand Image of Xiaomi Company: Take its Overseas Product Launches as an Example

In recent years, the mobile phone has become an indispensable part of people’s life, which is an important tool for people to socialize, shop, relax and pay. With the saturation of domestic mobile phone market, Chinese manufacturers are gradually casting their eyesight abroad and seeking to enter the overseas market. Xiaomi company is one of the best. Nowadays, almost all mobile phone manufacturers will launch new products through the product launching ceremony, which is also a good way of marketing and brand image transmission. The product launch usually contains abundant multimodal resources, such as image, text, music, video and so on. Therefore, the multimodal resources of Xiaomi product launch are worth exploring, which can provide experience and reference for other companies preparing to penetrate the international market. Drawing on the analytical framework of the interactive meaning of visual grammar, this thesis selects five videos of Xiaomi mobile phone product launch from 2016 to 2020 as the main research objects to elucidate how Xiaomi allocate the multimodal resources in its product launch and how multimodality facilitates the construction and transmission of Xiaomi’s brand image

An Empirical Study on Zero Address Terms Among Chinese College Students

Chinese address terms are the basis of interpersonal communication. On the one hand, a conversation usually begins with address terms which play a important role. On the other hand, choosing different address terms represents the different tone the speaker wants to express. Therefore, accurate and appropriate use of address terms is one of the important symbols of successful communication. However, using zero address terms is still very common because we don’t know how to address appropriately in some occasions. This paper aims to study the common types of zero address terms usage among university students, and try to summarize the main reasons. This study is based on daily conversations of college students in four common campus scenes which are office building, study building, store and playground. The following findings are obtained in this study. There are five common types of zero address terms phenomenon. They are polite expression, personal pronoun, no expression, onomatopoeia and body language. There are three main reasons for using zero address terms. They are occasion, interpersonal purpose and social development.

Efficiency Resource Allocation for Device-to-Device Underlay Communication Systems: A Reverse Iterative Combinatorial Auction Based Approach

Peer-to-peer communication has been recently considered as a popular issue for local area services. An innovative resource allocation scheme is proposed to improve the performance of mobile peer-to-peer, i.e., device-to-device (D2D), communications as an underlay in the downlink (DL) cellular networks. To optimize the system sum rate over the resource sharing of both D2D and cellular modes, we introduce a reverse iterative combinatorial auction as the allocation mechanism. In the auction, all the spectrum resources are considered as a set of resource units, which as bidders compete to obtain business while the packages of the D2D pairs are auctioned off as goods in each auction round. We first formulate the valuation of each resource unit, as a basis of the proposed auction. And then a detailed non-monotonic descending price auction algorithm is explained depending on the utility function that accounts for the channel gain from D2D and the costs for the system. Further, we prove that the proposed auction-based scheme is cheat-proof, and converges in a finite number of iteration rounds. We explain non-monotonicity in the price update process and show lower complexity compared to a traditional combinatorial allocation. The simulation results demonstrate that the algorithm efficiently leads to a good performance on the system sum rate.Comment: 26 pages, 6 fgures; IEEE Journals on Selected Areas in Communications, 201

Topic Modeling for Natural Language Understanding

This thesis presents new topic modeling methods to reveal underlying language structures. Topic models have seen many successes in natural language understanding field. Despite these successes, the further and deeper exploration of topic modeling in language processing and understanding requires the study of language itself and remains much to be explored. This thesis is to combine the study of topic modeling with the exploration of language. Two types of language are explored, the normal document texts, and the spoken language texts. The normal document texts include all the written texts, such as the news articles or the research papers. The spoken language text refers to the human speech directed at machines, such as smart phones to obtain a specific service. The main contributions of this thesis fall into two parts. The first part is the extraction of word/topic relation structure through the modeling of word pairs. Although the word/topic and relation structure has long been recognized as the key for language representation and understanding, few researchers explore the actual relation between words/topics simultaneously with statistical modeling. This thesis introduces a pairwise topic model to examine the relation structure of texts. The pairwise topic model is implemented on different document texts, such as news articles, research papers and medical records to get the word/topic transition and topic evolution. Another contribution of this thesis is the topic modeling for spoken language. Spoken language refers to the spoken text directed at machine to obtain a specific service. Spoken language understanding involves processing the spoken language and figure out how it maps to actions the user intents. This thesis explores the semantic and syntactic structure of spoken language in detail and provides the insight into the language structure. Also, a new topic modeling method is proposed to incorporate these linguistic features. The model can also be extended to incorporate prior knowledge, resulting in better interpretation and understanding of spoken language.Ph.D., Information Studies -- Drexel University, 201

Functional evaluation of Asp76, 84, 102 and 150 in human arsenic(III) methyltransferase (hAS3MT) interacting with S-adenosylmethionine

AbstractWe prepared eight mutants (D76P, D76N, D84P, D84N, D102P, D102N, D150P and D150N) to investigate the functions of residues Asp76, 84, 102 and 150 in human arsenic(III) methyltransferase (hAS3MT) interacting with the S-adenosylmethionine (SAM)-binding. The affinity of all the mutants for SAM were weakened. All the mutants except for D150N completely lost their methylation activities. Residues Asp76, 84, 102 and 150 greatly influenced hAS3MT catalytic activity via affecting SAM-binding or methyl transfer. Asp76 and 84 were located in the SAM-binding pocket, and Asp102 significantly affected SAM-binding via forming hydrogen bonds with SAM

Long range and duration underwater localization using molecular messaging

In this paper, we tackle the problem of how to locate a single entity with an unknown location in a vast underwater search space. In under-water channels, traditional wave-based signals suffer from rapid distance- and time-dependent energy attenuation, leading to expensive and lengthy search missions. In view of this, we investigate two molecular messaging methods for location discovery: a Rosenbrock gradient ascent algorithm, and a chemical encoding messaging method. In absence of explicit diffusion channel knowledge and in presence of diffusion noise, the Rosenbrock method is adapted to account for the blind search process and allow the robot to recover in areas of zero gradient. The two chemical methods are found to offer attractive performance trade-offs in complexity and robustness. Compared to conventional acoustic signals, the chemical methods proposed offers significantly longer propagation distance (1000km) and longer signal persistence duration (months)

Analysis on Heat Characteristics for Summer Maize Cropping in a Semi-Arid Region

Heat stress during flowering is a critical limitation for summer maize production. However, the incidence of heat varies with years and locations, and it poses a great risk to successful maize reproduction and kernel setting. Therefore, it is essential to provide a sound quantification of heat occurrence in relation to maize growth and development. Here, we analyzed the characteristics of heat occurrence based on climate data for over 60 years on Huaibei Plain, China. The effective accumulated temperature showed a slight interannual variation. The average maximum temperature (Tmax) during flowering was 32◦C–33◦C, which was approximately 2◦C higher than that over the whole growing season. The probability (P) for the daily Tmax > 33◦C during flowering was closer to 50% and this maximum temperature ranged between 33◦C and 37◦C. The five levels from normal to extreme heat for Tmax were defined. Across the six studied sites, the mild level heat stress accounted for most of incidents (P, 25–50%), followed by moderate (P, 13–25%) and severe (P, 0.5–13%), and the minimum for extreme heat stress (P, 0.5%). Four phases bracketing flowering during maize development were given, i.e., 1 week prior to anthesis, 1 week during anthesis, 1 week for anthesis-silking, and 1week post silking. There was a greater probability for heat stress incidents from anthesis to silking compared to the other developmental stages. Additionally, maize grain yield slightly increased with the increase in Tmax to 33◦C, but it declined as Tmax surpassed 33◦C. In conclusion, the pattern and characteristics of heat stress were quantified bracketing maize flowering. These findings assist to advise summer maize cropping strategies on the semi-arid and semi-humid Huaibei Plain, China or similar climate and cropping regions

Statistical inference of chromosomal homology based on gene colinearity and applications to Arabidopsis and rice

BACKGROUND: The identification of chromosomal homology will shed light on such mysteries of genome evolution as DNA duplication, rearrangement and loss. Several approaches have been developed to detect chromosomal homology based on gene synteny or colinearity. However, the previously reported implementations lack statistical inferences which are essential to reveal actual homologies. RESULTS: In this study, we present a statistical approach to detect homologous chromosomal segments based on gene colinearity. We implement this approach in a software package ColinearScan to detect putative colinear regions using a dynamic programming algorithm. Statistical models are proposed to estimate proper parameter values and evaluate the significance of putative homologous regions. Statistical inference, high computational efficiency and flexibility of input data type are three key features of our approach. CONCLUSION: We apply ColinearScan to the Arabidopsis and rice genomes to detect duplicated regions within each species and homologous fragments between these two species. We find many more homologous chromosomal segments in the rice genome than previously reported. We also find many small colinear segments between rice and Arabidopsis genomes