Gated Convolutional Bidirectional Attention-based Model for Off-topic Spoken Response Detection

Off-topic spoken response detection, the task aiming at predicting whether a response is off-topic for the corresponding prompt, is important for an automated speaking assessment system. In many real-world educational applications, off-topic spoken response detectors are required to achieve high recall for off-topic responses not only on seen prompts but also on prompts that are unseen during training. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for off-topic spoken response detection with high off-topic recall on both seen and unseen prompts. We introduce a new model, Gated Convolutional Bidirectional Attention-based Model (GCBiA), which applies bi-attention mechanism and convolutions to extract topic words of prompts and key-phrases of responses, and introduces gated unit and residual connections between major layers to better represent the relevance of responses and prompts. Moreover, a new negative sampling method is proposed to augment training data. Experiment results demonstrate that our novel approach can achieve significant improvements in detecting off-topic responses with extremely high on-topic recall, for both seen and unseen prompts.Comment: ACL2020 long pape

Effectiveness of simvastatin/aspirin combination in the treatment of coronary heart disease in the elderly, and its effect on cardiac function and levels of inflammatory factors

Purpose: To investigate the efficacy of simvastatin plus aspirin in the treatment of coronary heart disease in the elderly, and its effect on cardiac function and inflammatory factor levels.Methods: Eighty-seven identified elderly patients with coronary heart disease who were admitted to Nantong First People's Hospital, Nantong, China between January 2020 and June 2021 were recruited and assigned at a ratio of 1:1 to receive either conventional treatment (group A) or simvastatin plus aspirin (group B). The clinical endpoint was treatment efficacy.Results: No significant differences were found between the two groups in respect of their baseline data (p > 0.05). Simvastatin plus aspirin was associated with a significantly higher treatment efficacy versus conventional treatment (p < 0.05). The patients, after joint therapy, had more cases of grade I cardiac function and fewer cases of grade III cardiac function, compared with conventional treatment group (p < 0.05). The application of simvastatin plus aspirin resulted in lower levels of triglycerides (TGs), total cholesterol (TC), fasting plasma glucose (FPG), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), and highdensity lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) than the conventional treatment (p < 0.05). Simvastatin plus aspirin was also associated with lower levels of interleukin (IL)-6 and hypersensitive-c-reactive-protein (hs-CRP) when compared with conventional treatment (p < 0.05). Furthermore, simvastatin plus aspirin produced a similar incidence of adverse events with conventional treatment (p > 0.05).Conclusion: Simvastatin/aspirin combination therapy is effective in the treatment of coronary heart disease in the elderly. It efficiently lowers glucose levels, lipid metabolism, and inflammatory factors, but enhances the cardiac function of patients

A Rectangular Planar Spiral Antenna for GIS Partial Discharge Detection

A rectangular planar spiral antenna sensor was designed for detecting the partial discharge in gas insulation substations (GIS). It can expediently receive electromagnetic waves leaked from basin-type insulators and can effectively suppress low frequency electromagnetic interference from the surrounding environment. Certain effective techniques such as rectangular spiral structure, bow-tie loading, and back cavity structure optimization during the antenna design process can miniaturize antenna size and optimize voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) characteristics. Model calculation and experimental data measured in the laboratory show that the antenna possesses a good radiating performance and a multiband property when working in the ultrahigh frequency (UHF) band. A comparative study between characteristics of the designed antenna and the existing quasi-TEM horn antenna was made. Based on the GIS defect simulation equipment in the laboratory, partial discharge signals were detected by the designed antenna, the available quasi-TEM horn antenna, and the microstrip patch antenna, and the measurement results were compared

The Impact of Foreign Direct Investment on Income Convergence in China - A Spatial Panel Data Analysis

After taking into account the spatial dependence effects in the panel data consisting of all 31 provinces, direct-controlled municipalities, and autonomous regions in China between the years 1998 and 2017, it found significant spatial autocorrelation effects in both traditional absolute and conditional β income convergence models. At the national level, using the spatial econometric models (Spatial Error Model for absolute convergence and Spatial Durbin Model for conditional convergence), the analysis shows that in the past 19 years from 1999 to 2017, there is no absolute β income convergence. However, there is conditional β income convergence after controlling for all growth factors, while the positive effect of fixed asset investment on regional economic growth is significant, and the effect of population growth is significantly negative. The other growth factors such as FDI inflow, export, and higher education enrollment were surprisingly found no statistically significant effects on regional economic growth. From regional level (Spatial Durbin Model and Spatial Lag Model), there is no conditional β income convergence within each four economic regions. Nonetheless, the northeast region showed an income divergence trend, where only the fixed asset investment is positively significant. This study results imply that China should continue to improve fixed asset investment and control population growth to stimulate regional economic growth and income convergence

Dual-modal tracking of transplanted mesenchymal stem cells after myocardial infarction

Yefei Li*, Yuyu Yao*, Zulong Sheng, Yanxiaoxiao Yang, Genshan Ma,Department of Cardiology, Zhongda Hospital, Medical School of Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China*These two authors contributed equally to this work.Purpose: Results for implantation efficiency and effective improvement of cardiac function in the field of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are controversial. To attempt to clarify this debate, we utilized magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and near-infrared optical imaging (OI) to explore the effects of different delivery modes of mesenchymal stem cells on cell retention time and cardiac function after myocardial infarction (MI).Methods: Rat MSCs were labeled with superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles and 1, 1′-dioctadecyl-3,3,3′,3′-tetramethylindodicarbocyanine, 4-chlorobenzenesulfonate salt (DiD) for noninvasive cell tracking in a rat MI model. Rats underwent coronary artery ligation and were randomized into three experimental groups: intravenous (IV), intramyocardial (IM), and a control group. The first two groups referred to the route of delivery of the transplanted dual-labeled MSCs; whereas the control group was given an IV injection of serum-free medium one day post-MI. Cellular engraftment was determined 1 day and 7 days post cell delivery by measuring the iron and optical signals in explanted organs. Prussian blue staining and fluorescent microscopy were performed on histological sections for iron and DiD, respectively. Cardiac function was measured by echocardiography on day 7.Results: The cardiac function of the IM group increased significantly compared to the IV and control groups at day 7. In the IM group, labeled cells were visualized in the infracted heart by serial MRI, and the intensity by OI was significantly higher on day 1. In the IV group, the heart signals were significantly attenuated by dual-modal tracking at two time points, but the lung signals in OI were significantly stronger than the IM group at both time points.Conclusion: IM injection of MSCs increased cell engraftment within infarcted hearts and improved cardiac function after MI. However, IV infusion has a low efficacy due to the cell trapping in the lung. Therefore, direct injection may provide an advantage over IV, with regard to retention of stem cells and protection of cardiac function.Keywords: stem cell tracking, superparamagnetic iron oxide, DiD, cardiac function, myocardial infarctio

Effects of dispersion in tsunami Green's functions and implications for joint inversion with seismic and geodetic data: a case study of the 2010 Mentawai M_W 7.8 earthquake

Tsunami observations play an important role in resolving offshore earthquake slip distributions. Nondispersive shallow-water models are often used with a static initial sea surface pulse derived from seafloor deformation in computation of tsunami Green's functions. We compare this conventional approach with more advanced techniques based on a dispersive model with a static initial sea surface pulse and with the surface waves generated from kinematic seafloor deformation. These three sets of tsunami Green's functions are implemented in finite-fault inversions with and without seismic and geodetic data for the 2010 Mentawai M_w 7.8 tsunami earthquake. Seafloor excitation and wave dispersion produce more spread-out waveforms in the Green's functions leading to larger slip with more compact distribution through the inversions. The fit to the recorded tsunami and the deduced seismic moment, which reflects the displaced water volume, are relatively insensitive to the approach used for computing Green's functions

An accurate analytical model for tunnel FET output characteristics

The analytical models for the output characteristics of tunnel FETs (TFETs) based on Maxwell–Boltzmann (MB) statistics have some accuracy issues, especially in linear region of operation, when compared with more sophisticated numerical approaches. In this letter, by exploiting the thermal injection method (TIM), an accurate analytical model for the TFET potential profile is proposed. Although the approach is initially envisaged for heterojunction TFETs (H-TFETs), it could be straightforwardly adopted for homojunction TFETs. After an accurate description of the potential profile is obtained, then, the current is computed by means of a Landauer-like expression. Comparison with the numerical simulations at different bias conditions show that the predicted output characteristics qualitatively improve, leading to a significant enhancement in accuracy at a much less-computational cost

Paragraph-to-Image Generation with Information-Enriched Diffusion Model

Text-to-image (T2I) models have recently experienced rapid development, achieving astonishing performance in terms of fidelity and textual alignment capabilities. However, given a long paragraph (up to 512 words), these generation models still struggle to achieve strong alignment and are unable to generate images depicting complex scenes. In this paper, we introduce an information-enriched diffusion model for paragraph-to-image generation task, termed ParaDiffusion, which delves into the transference of the extensive semantic comprehension capabilities of large language models to the task of image generation. At its core is using a large language model (e.g., Llama V2) to encode long-form text, followed by fine-tuning with LORA to alignthe text-image feature spaces in the generation task. To facilitate the training of long-text semantic alignment, we also curated a high-quality paragraph-image pair dataset, namely ParaImage. This dataset contains a small amount of high-quality, meticulously annotated data, and a large-scale synthetic dataset with long text descriptions being generated using a vision-language model. Experiments demonstrate that ParaDiffusion outperforms state-of-the-art models (SD XL, DeepFloyd IF) on ViLG-300 and ParaPrompts, achieving up to 15% and 45% human voting rate improvements for visual appeal and text faithfulness, respectively. The code and dataset will be released to foster community research on long-text alignment.Comment: The project website is at: https://weijiawu.github.io/ParaDiffusionPage/. Code: https://github.com/weijiawu/ParaDiffusio

Effects of extreme rainfall events on phytoplankton community in a subtropical eutrophic lake: a mesocosm experiment

The impact of global climate change has led to an increase in extreme rainfall events, causing fluctuations in terrigenic inputs that significantly affect aquatic communities. Lake Changhu, the third-largest freshwater lake in Hubei Province, plays a crucial role as a reservoir of aquatic germplasm resources in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. In recent years, the lake has experienced a series of extreme rainfall events. In response to recent extreme rainfall events, a 42-day mesocosm experiment was conducted to understand the effect of terrigenic inputs on various aspects of phytoplankton in Lake Changhu, such as species composition, abundance, biomass, diversity, community turnover rates, resource use efficiency, and stability. The experiment involved the application of different terrigenic treatments, including a control group (CK, using lake water), low terrigenic input (LT), medium terrigenic input (MT), and high terrigenic input (HT). The results showed a noticeable shift in phytoplankton composition from a co-dominated state of Chlorophyta and Cyanobacteria in the CK treatment to a Cyanobacteria-dominated state in the other terrigenic treatments. Furthermore, the terrigenic inputs increased phytoplankton abundance, community turnover rates, diversity, and resistance. Comparatively, the diversity index of phytoplankton increased by 82.61%, 73.83%, and 70.41% in the LT, MT, and HT treatments, respectively, in contrast to the CK treatment. However, phytoplankton abundance decreased by 6.99%, 15.55%, and 14.76% in the LT, MT, and HT treatments. Additionally, the resource use efficiency decreased by 1.94%, 5.16%, and 14.19% in the LT, MT, and HT treatments, respectively, compared to the CK treatment. These findings provide valuable insights into monitoring and managing the water ecology in Lake Changhu, offering a scientific basis for implementing effective management strategies