Joint Bayesian Gaussian discriminant analysis for speaker verification

State-of-the-art i-vector based speaker verification relies on variants of Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA) for discriminant analysis. We are mainly motivated by the recent work of the joint Bayesian (JB) method, which is originally proposed for discriminant analysis in face verification. We apply JB to speaker verification and make three contributions beyond the original JB. 1) In contrast to the EM iterations with approximated statistics in the original JB, the EM iterations with exact statistics are employed and give better performance. 2) We propose to do simultaneous diagonalization (SD) of the within-class and between-class covariance matrices to achieve efficient testing, which has broader application scope than the SVD-based efficient testing method in the original JB. 3) We scrutinize similarities and differences between various Gaussian PLDAs and JB, complementing the previous analysis of comparing JB only with Prince-Elder PLDA. Extensive experiments are conducted on NIST SRE10 core condition 5, empirically validating the superiority of JB with faster convergence rate and 9-13% EER reduction compared with state-of-the-art PLDA.Comment: accepted by ICASSP201

Literary responses to bewilderment in western society : a study of Margaret Atwood's novels

Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 199

Art and Chinese Modernity in Connection with Lyon, 1920s-1940s

The twentieth century saw China undergo significant political, social and cultural transformations. Modernisation of art was an integral part of China’s national modernisation project. L’École nationale de beaux-arts de Lyon provided training to at least 58 students from China from 1920 to 1942. Lyon’s connection with modern Chinese art history, however, has not been sufficiently examined. As part of a larger project that examines the process of China’s art modernisation at the beginning of the twentieth century, this paper explores the significance of Lyon as a location of cultural intersection through selected cases of Chinese art students in Lyon. By documenting and analysing the process through which those individual students undertook the challenges of acquiring European concepts and practice of art, this paper demonstrates how the ideal for a modernised Chinese art was modelled largely on French art schools, and how the Chinese implemented their newly acquired knowledge and skills through institutional measures and individual efforts

中国现当代小说中的故乡构建初探 (Literary Nativism, the Native Place and Modern Chinese Fiction)

Although the importance of the native place in Chinese life is beyond dispute and it has been a significant preoccupation of Chinese authors throughout history, literary representations of the native place still remain to be studied systematically. This paper attempts to examine the construction of the native place in modern Chinese fiction and its role in literary representations of China. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the native place in Chinese literature remained an abstract notion without specific geographical locations and the narrative focus was on the ‘native-place sentiment’ (Bryna Goodman 1995). It is a modern phenomenon that the native place appears as a local cultural space with ethnographic details and is closely related to the need for narrating China, although it can still be abstract and symbolic. The construction of the native place is crucial in the project of national narration for modern Chinese fiction, as it is often created as the nation’s cultural origin and authentication. However, the relationship between the native place and national representation in Chinese fiction is paradoxical, because, on the one hand the native place necessarily differs in origin, and on the other hand, many Chinese authors are devoted to China as a cultural totality. This paper will focus on the paradoxical relationship between the authors’ nativist aspirations to create distinctive local cultural identities and their commitment to the abstract idea of a single Chinese nation. Furthermore, both the native place and national narration are intricately associated with the tendency of literary nativism, i.e. the belief and the practice that literary writing should focus on constructing the native place and that the narrative style should continue and develop the indigenous narrative traditions. In other words, poetics is part of the politics in the configuration of the native place. The initial questions I shall try to answer include: How is the native place viewed and configured in modern Chinese fiction? What kinds of local stories are generated as national tales and what is the role of the native place in such narratives? Why do writers ‘write local but think national’? Why do national myths in Chinese regional literatures compete to identify with the central nation-state

Location-Aware Cross-Layer Design Using Overlay Watermarks

A new orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system embedded with overlay watermarks for location-aware cross-layer design is proposed in this paper. One major advantage of the proposed system is the multiple functionalities the overlay watermark provides, which includes a cross-layer signaling interface, a transceiver identification for position-aware routing, as well as its basic role as a training sequence for channel estimation. Wireless terminals are typically battery powered and have limited wireless communication bandwidth. Therefore, efficient collaborative signal processing algorithms that consume less energy for computation and less bandwidth for communication are needed. Transceiver aware of its location can also improve the routing efficiency by selective flooding or selective forwarding data only in the desired direction, since in most cases the location of a wireless host is unknown. In the proposed OFDM system, location information of a mobile for efficient routing can be easily derived when a unique watermark is associated with each individual transceiver. In addition, cross-layer signaling and other interlayer interactive information can be exchanged with a new data pipe created by modulating the overlay watermarks. We also study the channel estimation and watermark removal techniques at the physical layer for the proposed overlay OFDM. Our channel estimator iteratively estimates the channel impulse response and the combined signal vector from the overlay OFDM signal. Cross-layer design that leads to low-power consumption and more efficient routing is investigated

Reasoning about Dependence, Preference and Coalitional Power

This paper presents a logic of preference and functional dependence (LPFD) and its hybrid extension (HLPFD), both of whose sound and strongly complete axiomatization are provided. The decidability of LPFD is also proved. The application of LPFD and HLPFD to modelling cooperative games in strategic and coalitional forms is explored. The resulted framework provides a unified view on Nash equilibrium, Pareto optimality and the core. The philosophical relevance of these game-theoretical notions to discussions of collective agency is made explicit. Some key connections with other logics are also revealed, for example, the coalition logic, the logic functional dependence and the logic of ceteris paribus preference

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Sentiment in “COVID-19” Reportage of CCTV News and The New York Times

Drawing support from the artificial intelligence platform of Baidu Cloud and the natural language processing approach, this paper provides an empirically-grounded micro-analysis of Sino-American news discourses on “COVID-19” pandemic in China 2020 by using keyword wordcloud analysis on sentiment expressions, namely the discourses from the websites of CCTV News and The New York Times. The authors analyzed the media’s intended attitudes expressed with sentiment, and found that the attitude of the Chinese people and China’s media towards the epidemic was mostly positive; while New York Times was mostly negative about the epidemic, especially at the peak of the outbreak. Such a difference presents a prevalent manifestation of recognition towards the epidemic led by either government or media institutions while people face uncertainties caused by corona virus, which may further influence the public opinion and attitudes towards the epidemic, which in turn has broader social/political-interactional purposes and public cognitive construction.