19 research outputs found
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Topic Prominence in Typological Interlanguage Development of Chinese Students' English
Topic prominence in Chinese EFL learners’ interlanguage
The present study aims to investigate the general characteristics of topic-prominent typological interlanguage development of Chinese learners of English in terms of acquiring subject-prominent English structures from a discourse perspec- tive. Topic structures mainly appear in Chinese discourse in the form of topic chains (Wang, 2002; 2004). The research target are the topic chain, which is the main topic-prominent structure in Chinese discourse, and zero anaphora, which is the most common topic anaphora in the topic chain. Two important findings emerged from the present study. First, the characteristics of Chinese topic chains are transferrable to the interlanguage of Chinese EFL learners, thus resulting in overgeneralization of the zero anaphora. Second, the interlanguage discourse of Chinese EFL learners reflects a change of the second language acquisition process from topic-prominence to subject-prominence, thus lending support to the dis- course transfer hypothesis.411091256Studies in Second Language Learning and Teachin
Robustness-Guided Image Synthesis for Data-Free Quantization
Quantization has emerged as a promising direction for model compression.
Recently, data-free quantization has been widely studied as a promising method
to avoid privacy concerns, which synthesizes images as an alternative to real
training data. Existing methods use classification loss to ensure the
reliability of the synthesized images. Unfortunately, even if these images are
well-classified by the pre-trained model, they still suffer from low semantics
and homogenization issues. Intuitively, these low-semantic images are sensitive
to perturbations, and the pre-trained model tends to have inconsistent output
when the generator synthesizes an image with poor semantics. To this end, we
propose Robustness-Guided Image Synthesis (RIS), a simple but effective method
to enrich the semantics of synthetic images and improve image diversity,
further boosting the performance of downstream data-free compression tasks.
Concretely, we first introduce perturbations on input and model weight, then
define the inconsistency metrics at feature and prediction levels before and
after perturbations. On the basis of inconsistency on two levels, we design a
robustness optimization objective to enhance the semantics of synthetic images.
Moreover, we also make our approach diversity-aware by forcing the generator to
synthesize images with small correlations in the label space. With RIS, we
achieve state-of-the-art performance for various settings on data-free
quantization and can be extended to other data-free compression tasks.Comment: Accepted at AAAI 202
Towards Distribution-Agnostic Generalized Category Discovery
Data imbalance and open-ended distribution are two intrinsic characteristics
of the real visual world. Though encouraging progress has been made in tackling
each challenge separately, few works dedicated to combining them towards
real-world scenarios. While several previous works have focused on classifying
close-set samples and detecting open-set samples during testing, it's still
essential to be able to classify unknown subjects as human beings. In this
paper, we formally define a more realistic task as distribution-agnostic
generalized category discovery (DA-GCD): generating fine-grained predictions
for both close- and open-set classes in a long-tailed open-world setting. To
tackle the challenging problem, we propose a Self-Balanced Co-Advice
contrastive framework (BaCon), which consists of a contrastive-learning branch
and a pseudo-labeling branch, working collaboratively to provide interactive
supervision to resolve the DA-GCD task. In particular, the contrastive-learning
branch provides reliable distribution estimation to regularize the predictions
of the pseudo-labeling branch, which in turn guides contrastive learning
through self-balanced knowledge transfer and a proposed novel contrastive loss.
We compare BaCon with state-of-the-art methods from two closely related fields:
imbalanced semi-supervised learning and generalized category discovery. The
effectiveness of BaCon is demonstrated with superior performance over all
baselines and comprehensive analysis across various datasets. Our code is
publicly available.Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 202
Book Review: The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics
Naoko Taguchi (Ed.)Routledge, New York, 2019. xiii+ 522 pages. $220. Hardcover. ISBN:978-0-8153-4976-
A Discourse Perspective of Topic-prominence in Chinese EFL Learners’ Interlanguage
The present study aims to investigate the general characteristics of topic-prominent typological interlanguage development of Chinese learners of English in terms of acquiring subject-prominent English structures from the discourse perspective. We have selected as the research target “topic chain” which is the main topic-prominent structure in Chinese discourse and “zero anaphora” which is the most common topic anaphor of topic chain. Topic structures mainly appear in Chinese discourse in the form of “topic chain” (Wang, 2002; 2004). Actually, in the event of a topic chain, research on topic structures should go into the typical range of discourse. Two important findings were yielded by the present study. First, the characteristics of Chinese topic chain are transferrable to the interlanguage of Chinese EFL learners, thus resulting in overgeneralization of zero anaphora; second, interlanguage discourse of Chinese EFL learners reflects the characteristics of a second language acquisition process from topic-prominence to subject-prominence, thus lending support to the discourse transfer hypothesis.
Book Review: Teaching business discourse
Business discourse teaching has become one of the primary aspects of business discourse research due to its pedagogy-oriented tradition. The book under review, Teaching Business Discourse, is the first monograph that is dedicated to this important perspective in a systematic manner, though it has been generally discussed in some related works, including Bargiela-Chiappini, Nickerson, and Planken, and Bhatia and Bremner. Drawing on the authors’ wide-ranging experience of business discourse studies, the monograph provides readers with a comprehensive and critical review of business discourse teaching research by covering its theories, methodologies, projects, teaching materials, resources and future directions with ten chapters distributed across four parts
The Periphrastic Topic Structures in Chinese-English Interlanguage
Periphrastic topic structures, as Chinese-style topic structures, belong to the category of prepositional topic fronting constructions in TSVO sequences. Findings from studies on periphrastic topic structures are inconsistent and present only a fragmented understanding. Therefore, the present study is conducted to make up for the gap and aims to reveal the developmental features of periphrastic topic structures (henceforth PTS) through investigating the production and the recognition of PTSs in Chinese college English learners’ Chinese-English interlanguage. The result suggests that with advances in learners’ English proficiency levels, periphrastic topic structures diminish from the preliminary stage to the intermediate stage gradually, but present a much higher degree of fossilization at the advanced level. Theoretically, this finding may further support Yang’s findings(2008) and validate the Selective Fossilization Hypothesis model (SFH model) proposed by Han (2009)
Cross-cultural Research of Speech Codes: Transitivity Processes in Corporate Social Responsibility Reports
Evolving from ethnographic research that determines what meanings are shared within a culture, studies regarding Speech Codes Theory have been conducted with implications for intercultural communication. Arguing for transitivity as speech codes in diverse cultures, this paper aims to describe and explain the transitivity attributes of English-medium Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports by Chinese and British/American corporations, and the transitivity variances between industries by Chinese corporations. Results reveal that frequencies of transitivity features in the Chinese CSR reports are significantly lower than those in the British/American reports, and that the relational process dominates in the corpus under investigation. Also, cross-industrial comparisons among Chinese corporations show that the mechanical manufacturing enterprises and the iron & steel enterprises share similar transitivity codes, but they differ from the energy enterprises distinctively. The paper concludes that linguistic/cultural contexts, translation strategies, moves in the CSR reports, and industry attributes together contribute to the transitivity codes and communicative conducts in different cultural and industrial backgrounds. This paper might help writers/translators of CSR reports in China better understand lexical and functional conformities and peculiarities reflected in Chinese and British/American CSR reports, enhance their corporate narration in the international communities, and thus reinforce communication with the general public by appropriately expressing and accurately translating transitivity processes