Being recognized in an algorithmic system: Cruel optimism in gay visibility on Douyin and Zhihu

© The Author(s) 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)Drawing upon “algorithmic ethnography” (Christin, 2020), this article enrolls algorithms to gather qualitative data to examine how Chinese social media platforms and their algorithms intersect with gay visibility. By looking critically into the ways that gay romance and HIV-related content are generated on Douyin and Zhihu, respectively, we argue that algorithmic gay visibility serves as a form of cruel optimism, which becomes a profitable convenience for corporate social media platforms and operates in an exclusionary matrix. The content that ordinary Chinese gay men are presented with (for example, the able-bodied, romanticized normative gay relationship and overly optimistic self-help advice for gay men living with HIV) is economically viable, which produces trending and monetizable items, including music tracks, viral dance routines and challenges, personas, medicine promotions, as well as commercial healthcare training and marketing. In contrast, non-conforming bodies, non-monogamous and queer relationships, as well as the depression, stigma and discrimination experienced by gay men living with HIV are algorithmically invisible.Peer reviewe

Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memory

Perception and expression of emotion are key factors to the success of dialogue systems or conversational agents. However, this problem has not been studied in large-scale conversation generation so far. In this paper, we propose Emotional Chatting Machine (ECM) that can generate appropriate responses not only in content (relevant and grammatical) but also in emotion (emotionally consistent). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses the emotion factor in large-scale conversation generation. ECM addresses the factor using three new mechanisms that respectively (1) models the high-level abstraction of emotion expressions by embedding emotion categories, (2) captures the change of implicit internal emotion states, and (3) uses explicit emotion expressions with an external emotion vocabulary. Experiments show that the proposed model can generate responses appropriate not only in content but also in emotion.Comment: Accepted in AAAI 201

Gay Men in/and Kangsi Coming

In September 2015, I interviewed Tiger-Girl, a 32-year-old Chinese gay man in Beijing, who was a video game designer. Like many other Beijing drifters, he came from an industrial city in the northeast of Hebei province, China, and moved to the city to seek a better life. Tiger-Girl was a loyal fan of TV entertainment. When asked about memorable images of gay men in the Chinese-language media, he cited two male entertainers, Mix Xiao (肖骁, a gender-nonconforming Chinese TV celebrity) and Edison Fan (樊野, a hunky Chinese influencer and gay model) from the popular Chinese online talk show U Can U Bibi (奇葩说; iQIYI, 2014–2021), to exemplify the two most common ways gay men have been constructed by Chinese-language media and popular culture, as either “sissy” or “outstanding” (which refers to the “macho” men). Tiger-Girl explained that being gay means “two men love each other in a manly way.” Therefore, by lacking masculinity, effeminate gay men like Mix Xiao “have a negative impact on the Chinese gay community, who only reinforce the stereotypes of gay men as ‘sissies’ (娘娘腔).” By contrast, Tiger-Girl highly commended Edison Fan for his masculine images and viewed him as a positive role model for Chinese gay men. Tiger-Girl’s story led me to wonder what the social meanings of the new “gay” images on entertainment media screens, such as Mix Xiao and Edison Fan, are, and how these representations can create new meanings of Chinese gay sexualities. How and why do these new gay representations differ from their precursors in the Chinese-language media? I begin by outlining the rise and fall of Kangsi Coming in the context of Chinese language TV in transition. Despite remaining under certain regulation and censorship, TV has become increasingly dynamic, digitized, heterogeneous, and transcultural in the Chinese-speaking world. In this context, I explore the discussion of “gay typification” in popular media, which is, as Dyer argues, “a near necessity for the representation of gayness, the product of social, political, practical and textual determinations” (2002, 20). I examine two dominant gay types represented in Kangsi Coming and U Can U Bibi: the “sissy” and the “macho,” which each signifies both a gay subject and object of desire. The new gay representations analyzed in this chapter show how popular culture both creates and constrains gay identities. Nevertheless, they do not exhaust the range of gay types in Chinese-language media. In conclusion, I argue that it is impossible to treat the issue of gay visibility and representation in isolation from the actual consumers of queer media cultures. Hence, I call for a reflexive ethnographic approach that is able to unpack the incompatible expectations and outcomes at stake in the increasing queer visibility enabled by digital media technologies

Watching National Treasure, creating danmei tongren: stories of power and the power of stories

Discussing danmei tongren (the Chinese term for slash fan creations) fandom of the mainland Chinese variety television programme National Treasure, this article examines how the meanings of Chinese television are perceived, contested, extended, and transformed by female fan audiences. By undertaking close reading of both danmei tongren fiction and music videos, we investigate how Chinese female fans creatively rework, extend, transgress, and subvert their favourite popular media texts to speak to their shared interests and fantasies, working-in stories of romance, sex, and intimacy between men and removing sexist, heteronormative, and nationalist discourses. Our examination shows that National Treasure danmei tongren fandom concerns both stories of power relationships across genders, sexualities, classes, ages, and these stories’ power over women. It offers a communal space for amateur and alternative female cultural production in which marginalised voices can speak back to mainstream media culture in China

Your Contrastive Learning Is Secretly Doing Stochastic Neighbor Embedding

Contrastive learning, especially self-supervised contrastive learning (SSCL), has achieved great success in extracting powerful features from unlabeled data. In this work, we contribute to the theoretical understanding of SSCL and uncover its connection to the classic data visualization method, stochastic neighbor embedding (SNE), whose goal is to preserve pairwise distances. From the perspective of preserving neighboring information, SSCL can be viewed as a special case of SNE with the input space pairwise similarities specified by data augmentation. The established correspondence facilitates deeper theoretical understanding of learned features of SSCL, as well as methodological guidelines for practical improvement. Specifically, through the lens of SNE, we provide novel analysis on domain-agnostic augmentations, implicit bias and robustness of learned features. To illustrate the practical advantage, we demonstrate that the modifications from SNE to $t$-SNE can also be adopted in the SSCL setting, achieving significant improvement in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution generalization.Comment: Accepted by ICLR 202

Biomedical Entity Recognition by Detection and Matching

Biomedical named entity recognition (BNER) serves as the foundation for numerous biomedical text mining tasks. Unlike general NER, BNER require a comprehensive grasp of the domain, and incorporating external knowledge beyond training data poses a significant challenge. In this study, we propose a novel BNER framework called DMNER. By leveraging existing entity representation models SAPBERT, we tackle BNER as a two-step process: entity boundary detection and biomedical entity matching. DMNER exhibits applicability across multiple NER scenarios: 1) In supervised NER, we observe that DMNER effectively rectifies the output of baseline NER models, thereby further enhancing performance. 2) In distantly supervised NER, combining MRC and AutoNER as span boundary detectors enables DMNER to achieve satisfactory results. 3) For training NER by merging multiple datasets, we adopt a framework similar to DS-NER but additionally leverage ChatGPT to obtain high-quality phrases in the training. Through extensive experiments conducted on 10 benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of DMNER.Comment: 9 pages content, 2 pages appendi

A probabilistic track model for tropical cyclone risk assessment using multitask learning

Tropical cyclone (TC) track forecasting is critical for wind risk assessment. This work proposes a novel probabilistic TC track forecasting model based on mixture density network (MDN) and multitask learning (MTL). The existing NN-based probabilistic TC track prediction models focus on directly modeling the distribution of the future TC positions. Multitask learning has been shown to boost the performance of single tasks when the tasks are relevant. This work divides the probabilistic track prediction task into two sub-tasks: a deterministic prediction of the future TC position and a probabilistic prediction of the residual between the deterministic prediction and the actual TC location. The MDN is employed to realize the probabilistic prediction task. Since the target values of the MDN in this work are the residuals, which depend on the prediction result of the deterministic task, a novel training method is developed to train the MTL model properly. The proposed model is tested against statistical and other learning-based models on historical TC data. The results show that the proposed model outperforms other models in making probabilistic predictions. This approach advances TC track forecasting by integrating MDN and MTL, showing promise in enhancing probabilistic predictions and improving disaster preparedness

Short Video Activism With and on Douyin: An Innovative Repertoire of Contention for Chinese Consumers

This article examines consumer video activism tactics in China and their impact on Chinese consumers and society. Drawing upon 56 semistructured interviews and a case study analysis of Chinese online consumer protest in 2018, we argue that short-video-activism tactics have become an innovative repertoire of contention for Chinese consumers and Douyin, the “sister app” of TikTok, has become a real-time updated database of this repertoire. Using Douyin as a case study, we argue that it plays three key roles in mediating Chinese consumer activism: a techno-cultural construct that affords highly heterogeneous users to present everyday experiences via short videos; a multisided market that profoundly affects the tactics consumers choose to amplify their voices; and a governing entity that both moderates content for its users and simultaneously is subject to government regulations

New tumor-targeted nanosized delivery carrier for oligonucleotides: characteristics in vitro and in vivo

Tianyang Zhou1,2, Xin Jia1, Huixiang Li3, Jin Wang3, Hongling Zhang1,2, Youmei A1,2, Zhenzhong Zhang1,21School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, 2Nanotechnology Research Center for Drugs, 3Department of Pathology, Medical School of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, People’s Republic of ChinaBackground: The purpose of this study was to investigate the in vitro and in vivo characteristics of a new tumor-targeted nanosized delivery carrier for antisense oligonucleotide (ASON).Methods: Polyethylenimine (PEI) was used to condense ASON to form nanosized complexes (PEI/ASON), which were then modified using asparagine-glycine-arginine (NGR) peptide to obtain a tumor-targeted nanosized delivery carrier (NGR/PEI/ASON). The conditions required to form PEI/ASON were investigated.Results: A linear correlation between the natural logarithm of the N/P ratio (PEI to ASON) and the zeta potential of the PEI/ASON complexes was found, ranging from 1.5 to 5.0. The pH of the solution strongly influenced the zeta potential of the PEI/ASON complexes. PEI/ASON and NGR/PEI/ASON were stable in RPMI-1640 culture medium in the presence of Dextran 70. Incorporation of ASON into PEI/ASON and NGR/PEI/ASON complexes prevented degradation of ASON by DNase I.Conclusion: Both ASON/PEI and NGR/PEI/ASON complexes enhanced the uptake of ASON by EC9706 cells in vitro. In vivo, NGR/PEI/ASON complexes had the ability to target tumor tissues effectively.Keywords: nanosized delivery system, squamous cell carcinoma, antisense oligonucleotid