FutureTOD: Teaching Future Knowledge to Pre-trained Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue

Pre-trained language models based on general text enable huge success in the NLP scenario. But the intrinsical difference of linguistic patterns between general text and task-oriented dialogues makes existing pre-trained language models less useful in practice. Current dialogue pre-training methods rely on a contrastive framework and face the challenges of both selecting true positives and hard negatives. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue pre-training model, FutureTOD, which distills future knowledge to the representation of the previous dialogue context using a self-training framework. Our intuition is that a good dialogue representation both learns local context information and predicts future information. Extensive experiments on diverse downstream dialogue tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, especially the generalization, robustness, and learning discriminative dialogue representations capabilities.Comment: ACL 2023 Main Conferenc

Two new species of the genus Asceua Thorell, 1887 (Araneae, Zodariidae) from China

The spider genus Asceua Thorell, 1887 contains 34 species, almost entirely limited to Indochina, India, Sri Lanka and China, with a regional distribution. Eleven species of Asceua are currently only known from China, five of them are described only from one sex.Two new spider species of the genus Asceua are reported from China, A. haocongi sp. n. (♂♀, Hainan) and A. zijin sp. n. (♂♀, Jiangsu). Photos and a morphological description of the new species are provided

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Figure 21. Alistra pikachu Lin & Li in Twenty-three new spider species (Arachnida: Araneae) from Asia

Figure 21. Alistra pikachu Lin & Li, sp. nov., paratype female. A. Epigyne, ventral view; B. Vulva, dorsal view. Scale bars = 0.05 mm.Published as part of Lin, Yejie, Marusik, Yuri M., Gao, Caixia, Xu, Hao, Zhang, Xiaoqing, Wang, Ziyi, Zhu, Wenhui & Li, Shuqiang, 2021, Twenty-three new spider species (Arachnida: Araneae) from Asia, pp. 91-152 in Zoological Systematics 46 (2) on page 116, DOI: 10.11865/zs.2021201, http://zenodo.org/record/536706

Figure 18 in Twenty-three new spider species (Arachnida: Araneae) from Asia

Figure 18. Eresus lishizheni Lin, Marusik & Li, sp. nov., holotype male, palp. A. Conductor, right palp, retrolateral view; B. Conductor, left palp, prolateral view; C. Palp, left palp, prolateral view; D. Palp, left, palp, ventral view; E. Palp, left palp, retrolateral view. Scale bars: A–B = 0.1 mm; C–E = 0.3 mm.Published as part of Lin, Yejie, Marusik, Yuri M., Gao, Caixia, Xu, Hao, Zhang, Xiaoqing, Wang, Ziyi, Zhu, Wenhui & Li, Shuqiang, 2021, Twenty-three new spider species (Arachnida: Araneae) from Asia, pp. 91-152 in Zoological Systematics 46 (2) on page 113, DOI: 10.11865/zs.2021201, http://zenodo.org/record/536706

Figure 39. Episinus bonjovi Lin & Li in Twenty-three new spider species (Arachnida: Araneae) from Asia

Figure 39. Episinus bonjovi Lin & Li, sp. nov., paratype female. A. Epigyne, ventral view; B. Vulva, dorsal view. Scale bars = 0.02 mm.Published as part of Lin, Yejie, Marusik, Yuri M., Gao, Caixia, Xu, Hao, Zhang, Xiaoqing, Wang, Ziyi, Zhu, Wenhui & Li, Shuqiang, 2021, Twenty-three new spider species (Arachnida: Araneae) from Asia, pp. 91-152 in Zoological Systematics 46 (2) on page 136, DOI: 10.11865/zs.2021201, http://zenodo.org/record/536706

Figure 28. Pimoa shoja Zhang & Li in Twenty-three new spider species (Arachnida: Araneae) from Asia

Figure 28. Pimoa shoja Zhang & Li, sp. nov., holotype male, left palp. A. Prolateral view; B. Ventral view; C. Retrolateral view. Scale bars = 0.3 mm.Published as part of Lin, Yejie, Marusik, Yuri M., Gao, Caixia, Xu, Hao, Zhang, Xiaoqing, Wang, Ziyi, Zhu, Wenhui & Li, Shuqiang, 2021, Twenty-three new spider species (Arachnida: Araneae) from Asia, pp. 91-152 in Zoological Systematics 46 (2) on page 124, DOI: 10.11865/zs.2021201, http://zenodo.org/record/536706

Figure 45. Episinus tongyani Lin & Li in Twenty-three new spider species (Arachnida: Araneae) from Asia

Figure 45. Episinus tongyani Lin & Li, sp. nov., paratype female. A. Epigyne, ventral view; B. Vulva, dorsal view. Scale bars = 0.1 mm.Published as part of Lin, Yejie, Marusik, Yuri M., Gao, Caixia, Xu, Hao, Zhang, Xiaoqing, Wang, Ziyi, Zhu, Wenhui & Li, Shuqiang, 2021, Twenty-three new spider species (Arachnida: Araneae) from Asia, pp. 91-152 in Zoological Systematics 46 (2) on page 142, DOI: 10.11865/zs.2021201, http://zenodo.org/record/536706

Figure 1. Anyphaena grovyle Lin & Li in Twenty-three new spider species (Arachnida: Araneae) from Asia

Figure 1. Anyphaena grovyle Lin & Li, sp. nov., holotype male, left palp. A. Prolateral view; B. Ventral view; C. Retrolateral view. Scale bar = 0.3 mm.Published as part of <i>Lin, Yejie, Marusik, Yuri M., Gao, Caixia, Xu, Hao, Zhang, Xiaoqing, Wang, Ziyi, Zhu, Wenhui & Li, Shuqiang, 2021, Twenty-three new spider species (Arachnida: Araneae) from Asia, pp. 91-152 in Zoological Systematics 46 (2)</i> on page 93, DOI: 10.11865/zs.2021201, <a href="http://zenodo.org/record/5367065">http://zenodo.org/record/5367065</a&gt

Figure 24. Belisana yuexiu Yao & Li, 2020, female. A in Twenty-three new spider species (Arachnida: Araneae) from Asia

Figure 24. Belisana yuexiu Yao & Li, 2020, female. A. External female genitalia, ventral view; B. Vulva, dorsal view; C. Habitus, dorsal view; D. Habitus, ventral view. Scale bars = 0.2 mm.Published as part of Lin, Yejie, Marusik, Yuri M., Gao, Caixia, Xu, Hao, Zhang, Xiaoqing, Wang, Ziyi, Zhu, Wenhui & Li, Shuqiang, 2021, Twenty-three new spider species (Arachnida: Araneae) from Asia, pp. 91-152 in Zoological Systematics 46 (2) on page 119, DOI: 10.11865/zs.2021201, http://zenodo.org/record/536706