Text Coherence Analysis Based on Deep Neural Network

In this paper, we propose a novel deep coherence model (DCM) using a convolutional neural network architecture to capture the text coherence. The text coherence problem is investigated with a new perspective of learning sentence distributional representation and text coherence modeling simultaneously. In particular, the model captures the interactions between sentences by computing the similarities of their distributional representations. Further, it can be easily trained in an end-to-end fashion. The proposed model is evaluated on a standard Sentence Ordering task. The experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness and promise in coherence assessment showing a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art by a wide margin.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, CIKM 201

Articulatory Copy Synthesis Based on the Speech Synthesizer VocalTractLab

Articulatory copy synthesis (ACS), a subarea of speech inversion, refers to the reproduction of natural utterances and involves both the physiological articulatory processes and their corresponding acoustic results. This thesis proposes two novel methods for the ACS of human speech using the articulatory speech synthesizer VocalTractLab (VTL) to address or mitigate the existing problems of speech inversion, such as non-unique mapping, acoustic variation among different speakers, and the time-consuming nature of the process. The first method involved finding appropriate VTL gestural scores for given natural utterances using a genetic algorithm. It consisted of two steps: gestural score initialization and optimization. In the first step, gestural scores were initialized using the given acoustic signals with speech recognition, grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P), and a VTL rule-based method for converting phoneme sequences to gestural scores. In the second step, the initial gestural scores were optimized by a genetic algorithm via an analysis-by-synthesis (ABS) procedure that sought to minimize the cosine distance between the acoustic features of the synthetic and natural utterances. The articulatory parameters were also regularized during the optimization process to restrict them to reasonable values. The second method was based on long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional neural networks, which were responsible for capturing the temporal dependence and the spatial structure of the acoustic features, respectively. The neural network regression models were trained, which used acoustic features as inputs and produced articulatory trajectories as outputs. In addition, to cover as much of the articulatory and acoustic space as possible, the training samples were augmented by manipulating the phonation type, speaking effort, and the vocal tract length of the synthetic utterances. Furthermore, two regularization methods were proposed: one based on the smoothness loss of articulatory trajectories and another based on the acoustic loss between original and predicted acoustic features. The best-performing genetic algorithms and convolutional LSTM systems (evaluated in terms of the difference between the estimated and reference VTL articulatory parameters) obtained average correlation coefficients of 0.985 and 0.983 for speaker-dependent utterances, respectively, and their reproduced speech achieved recognition accuracies of 86.25% and 64.69% for speaker-independent utterances of German words, respectively. When applied to German sentence utterances, as well as English and Mandarin Chinese word utterances, the neural network based ACS systems achieved recognition accuracies of 73.88%, 52.92%, and 52.41%, respectively. The results showed that both of these methods not only reproduced the articulatory processes but also reproduced the acoustic signals of reference utterances. Moreover, the regularization methods led to more physiologically plausible articulatory processes and made the estimated articulatory trajectories be more articulatorily preferred by VTL, thus reproducing more natural and intelligible speech. This study also found that the convolutional layers, when used in conjunction with batch normalization layers, automatically learned more distinctive features from log power spectrograms. Furthermore, the neural network based ACS systems trained using German data could be generalized to the utterances of other languages

A study of the effects of size-dependent processes on survival and growth of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) larvae

Fish year-class strength can be established at early life stages, such as the egg and larval stage. A small variation in growth and survival during these early life periods can result in a substantial variation in fish recruitment. Therefore, a better understanding of factors influencing growth and survival of fish eggs and larvae can help fisheries scientists better understand the variations in fish population sizes. Based on a literature review and laboratory experiments, this study investigated the size-dependent effects on early life stages (egg and larvae) of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua). -- Egg size can be influenced by many factors including female size (age, length or weight), fecundity and seasonal temperature. Larval size at hatching is often related to egg size and incubation temperature. Size (stage)-dependent survival has been observed for larvae in many studies. Growth rate, which may be influenced by many factors including temperature and food supply, is one of the key factors determining larval size and mortality rate. -- For Atlantic cod, my study showed that larger eggs yielded larger larvae at hatching, but took longer to hatch. Larval size at hatching and incubation time were negatively correlated with incubation temperature. Although neither egg size nor incubation temperature was found to affect yolk size at hatching, higher accumulated incubation temperature significantly decreased the yolk size at hatching, but increased larval size at hatching. -- The larval survival and growth experiment showed that feeding conditions and larval size at hatching significantly influenced larval survival. Better feeding resulted in higher survival. The study found that the survival rate for small larvae was higher than that for large larvae, which might result from the absence of predators in this study. Higher temperature reduced the time of yolk utilization and thus caused the cod larvae to start exogenous feeding earlier. The growth rate of cod larvae during the exogenous feeding period is higher than that during endogenous feeding period. The first few days of growth mainly resulted in a significant increase in larval weight. Delayed first feeding significantly decreased the growth rate in cod larvae. However, the large larvae showed a higher growth rate compared with small larvae under the delayed first feeding condition. After a 10 to 13-day acclimatization, the larvae under delayed first feeding exhibited the compensatory growth. -- The size effect on cod larval growth was only significant in the delayed feeding condition, which implies that the bigger the better is more evident in cod larvae under unfavourable conditions, such as delayed initial feeding in this study

Advanced Techniques for High-Throughput Cellular Communications

The next generation wireless communication systems require ubiquitous high-throughput mobile connectivity under a range of challenging network settings (urban versus rural, high device density, mobility, etc). To improve the performance of the system, the physical layer design is of great importance. The previous research on improving the physical layer properties includes: a) highly directional transmissions that can enhance the throughput and spatial reuse; b) enhanced MIMO that can eliminate contention, enabling linear increase of capacity with number of antennas; c) mmWave technologies which operate on GHz bandwidth to over substantially higher throughput; d) better cooperative spectrum sharing with cognitive radios; e) better multiple access method which can mitigate multiuser interference and allow more multi-users. This dissertation addresses several techniques in the physical layer design of the next generation wireless communication systems. In chapter two, an orthogonal frequency division with code division multiple access (OFDM-CDMA) systems is proposed and a polyphase code is used to improve multiple access performance and make the OFDM signal satisfy the peak to average ratio (PAPR) constraint. Chapter three studies the I/Q imbalance for direct down converter. For wideband transmitter and receiver that use direct conversion for I/Q sampling, the I/Q imbalance becomes a critical issue. With higher I/Q imbalance, there will be higher degradation in quadrature amplitude modulation, which degrades the throughput tremendously. Chapter four investigate a problem of spectrum sharing for cognitive wideband communication. An energy-efficient sub-Nyquist sampling algorithm is developed for optimal sampling and spectrum sensing. In chapter ve, we study the channel estimation of millimeter wave full-dimensional MIMO communication. The problem is formulated as an atomic-norm minimization problem and algorithms are derived for the channel estimation in different situations. In this thesis, mathematical optimization is applied as the main approach to analyze and solve the problems in the physical layer of wireless communication so that the high-throughput is achieved. The algorithms are derived along with the theoretical analysis, which are validated with numerical results

Study of Comparative Advantages of Chinese and Indian Pharmaceutical Industries under Globalization

The authors explore the background and major factors that have promoted the growth of Pharmaceutical industry in India. Government policy and globalization strategy have played critical roles in positioning India as a pharmaceutical powerhouse. China, facing similar challenges and opportunities in the global economy, could draw valuable lessons from India’s growth story. There are also synergy and strategic fit between the two emerging economy in the pharmaceutical industry. Key words: China; India; Intellectual Property Rights (IPR); Pharmaceutical industry; MN

Pathways to sustainable grassland development in China: findings of three case studies

Grassland development serves as an important part of the national sustainable development strategy in China. This paper defines the strategic objectives of grassland development in China based on the national strategy, the current status of grassland development in China and the status of grassland development internationally. As China is at a transformational stage of implementing an ecological economic system in grassland development, top priorities should be given to enhance the values of grassland ecosystem services, reduce the pressures on the grasslands, and restructure the grassland industry. Case studies on three pasture areas in Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, which have distinct ecological and climatic features and are at different development stages, revealed that the core issue for sustainable development of grassland in China is in addressing the conflict between the people and grasslands. Improving the social security system and enhancing the capacity of the herders in implementing sustainable development are the recommended pathways for sustainable grassland development in China.Die Entwicklung von Steppengebieten ist ein wichtiges Element der Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie in der VR China. Dieses Papier erläutert die strategischen Ziele der Steppengebietsentwicklung im Rahmen der Strategie zur nachhaltigen Entwicklung in China und bettet diese in die internationalen Entwicklungen der Steppengebietspolitik ein. Zur Lösung der Armutsfalle der Herdenbesitzer in Steppengebieten wird eine Transformationsstrategie der integrierten ökologischen, ökonomischen und sozialen Nachhaltigkeit vorgeschlagen und programmatisch ausformuliert. Die Bewertung und Honorierung von Ökosystemdienstleistungen spielt darin eine zentrale Rolle wie auch die Verbesserung der Sozialversicherungssysteme für ländliche Räume. Drei Fallbeispiele aus Sichuan und der Inneren Mongolei zeigen die Machbarkeit und die verschiedenen Stufen dieser Strategie unter sehr unterschiedlichen klimatischen und sozioökonomischen Entwicklungsbedingungen