Beyond Triplet: Leveraging the Most Data for Multimodal Machine Translation

Multimodal machine translation (MMT) aims to improve translation quality by incorporating information from other modalities, such as vision. Previous MMT systems mainly focus on better access and use of visual information and tend to validate their methods on image-related datasets. These studies face two challenges. First, they can only utilize triple data (bilingual texts with images), which is scarce; second, current benchmarks are relatively restricted and do not correspond to realistic scenarios. Therefore, this paper correspondingly establishes new methods and new datasets for MMT. First, we propose a framework 2/3-Triplet with two new approaches to enhance MMT by utilizing large-scale non-triple data: monolingual image-text data and parallel text-only data. Second, we construct an English-Chinese {e}-commercial {m}ulti{m}odal {t}ranslation dataset (including training and testing), named EMMT, where its test set is carefully selected as some words are ambiguous and shall be translated mistakenly without the help of images. Experiments show that our method is more suitable for real-world scenarios and can significantly improve translation performance by using more non-triple data. In addition, our model also rivals various SOTA models in conventional multimodal translation benchmarks.Comment: 8 pages, ACL 2023 Findin

Development and application of an antigen capture ELISA assay for diagnosis of Japanese encephalitis virus in swine, human and mosquito

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Japanese encephalitis (JE) is a serious zoonosis caused by the Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) which is a mosquito-borne pathogen of the family <it>Flavivirus</it>. However, the application of several developed laboratory methods for the detection of JEV antigens or antibodies are limited by their requirements of laboratory operations, skilled technicians and special facilities.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>To develop a method for detecting JEV antigen in swine, human, mosquito and other clinical specimens specifically, conveniently and effectively, an antigen capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was established in this study. Sensitivity, specificity, repeatability and stability of the developed method were evaluated, and 60 clinical samples were tested in this study. The results demonstrated that the antigen capture ELISA was capable in detecting JEV antigen with high sensitivity and specificity compared with conventional methods. 14 samples showed the positive result with coincidence rate of 70%, and 46 displayed negative result with coincidence rate of 100% as compared to that of reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The developed ELISA assay provides a convenient and specific method for the large-scale determination of JEV antigen in infected swine, human and mosquito samples with high sensitivity and specificity.</p

Inverse altitude effect disputes the theoretical foundation of stable isotope paleoaltimetry

Stable isotope paleoaltimetry that reconstructs paleoelevation requires stable isotope (δD or δ18O) values to follow the altitude effect. Some studies found that the δD or δ18O values of surface isotopic carriers in some regions increase with increasing altitude, which is defined as an “inverse altitude effect” (IAE). The IAE directly contradicts the basic theory of stable isotope paleoaltimetry. However, the causes of the IAE remain unclear. Here, we explore the mechanisms of the IAE from an atmospheric circulation perspective using δD in water vapor on a global scale. We find that two processes cause the IAE: (1) the supply of moisture with higher isotopic values from distant source regions, and (2) intense lateral mixing between the lower and mid-troposphere along the moisture transport pathway. Therefore, we caution that the influences of those two processes need careful consideration for different mountain uplift stages before using stable isotope palaeoaltimetry

Controls on Stable Water Isotopes in Monsoonal Precipitation Across the Bay of Bengal: Atmosphere and Surface Analysis

Stable hydrogen isotopes in monsoonal precipitation (δDp) at three sites (Port Blair, Barisal and Darjeeling) reveal the factors governing δDp variations over a south-north gradient across the Bay of Bengal. We found that the δDp at each site continuously decreases from May to September and these trends become more pronounced from south to north. The decreasing trends of downstream δDp closely follow the decreasing trends of upstream stable hydrogen isotopes in water vapor (δDv), which indicates that upstream δDv properties shape initial spatiotemporal patterns of the downstream δDp (“shaping effect”). Additionally, our results demonstrate that, during moisture transport, upstream vertical air motions (convection and downward motion) and topographic relief magnify the amplitude of the decreasing trends of downstream δD (“magnifying effect”). Our findings imply that upstream δD properties and relevant atmospheric and pv topographical conditions along the moisture transport pathway need to be considered collectively to better interpret paleoclimate records

Variability and the fundamental properties of production lines

The concept of variability has been commonly used in practice and it is an important performance index of manufacturing systems. In this study, the definition of system variability is given through the insight of Kingman’s approximation. The explicit expression for the variability of a production line is derived based on intrinsic ratios and contribution factors. With the derived results, properties of variability for a production line in terms of job arrival rate, service rate and bounds on variability are examined. Simulation results are given to validate the derived properties. The result can be used to guide the design and operations of manufacturing systems.MOE (Min. of Education, S’pore)Accepted versio