Comparação entre o contexto de aprendizagem chinês e português

Vários estudos mostraram que, no que diz respeito à fonética, os falantes nativos de chinês têm dificuldade em perceber e produzir, sobretudo, quatro grupos de consoantes: consoantes bilabiais; consoantes velares; consoantes líquidas e consoantes linguodentais (Flege 1995; Yang 2014; Diana 2016; Qiaoni 2018; Adrinao 2020). Contudo, embora existam vários estudos na área da fonética que apontam para este fenómeno, a investigação desenvolvida até ao presente carece de soluções para esta dificuldade. No presente trabalho, analisa-se o impacto da referida limitação de duas maneiras distintas: partindo do contexto de aulas de fonética portuguesa no grau de aperfeiçoamento dos estudantes chineses, comparando-o com o contexto de aulas de fonética portuguesa em universidades da China e de Portugal. A comparação final da competência dos estudantes foi realizada através da aplicação de testes de perceção e produção a 24 estudantes chineses. Os testes foram aplicados em dois momentos distintos, com um intervalo de três meses entre eles. A amostra foi constituída por três grupos, com idades compreendidas entre os 20 e os 24 anos, com um nível de língua portuguesa entre B1 e B2. Dois dos grupos receberam cursos de fonética na China ou em Portugal e o terceiro grupo era um grupo de controlo. Este último grupo não recebeu cursos de fonética, mas que vivia em Portugal na época do estudo, servindo como referência para a influência do ambiente linguístico na fonética. Neste trabalho, investiga-se o estudo da fonética portuguesa com os objetivos de: 1) compreender o efeito de ter ou não ter aulas de fonética nos estudantes chineses no mesmo ambiente linguístico, e 2) comparar o desempenho dos alunos quem tiveram aulas de fonética na China ou em Portugal. Éimportante ressalvar que o contexto de pandemia limitou o desenvolvimento do trabalho de investigação, pelo que os resultados só poderão ser usados como referência. Os dados obtidos mostram que há muitos estudantes que, apesar de viverem em Portugal, têm pouco contacto com a língua portuguesa, a não ser no contexto de aulas, para efetuar compras e viajar. Os resultados também apontam para o facto de as aulas de fonética em universidades portuguesas ajudarem os estudantes chineses a melhorar o seu desempenho em português, preenchendo as lacunas dos seus conhecimentos na China, resultando numa melhoria da sua capacidade de perceção e, consequentemente, pronúncia, mas isto varia de pessoa para pessoa. Por último, no presente trabalho de investigação, observa-se que as aulas de fonética nas universidades chinesas são direcionadas para os estudantes com dificuldades, para que os mesmos possam melhorar mais rapidamente. No entanto, os estudantes em contexto chinês não demonstram um desempenho tão elevado como os que estudam em Portugal e revelam, ainda, ter dificuldade na perceção e produção das consoantes alvo de observação.Several studies have shown that, with regard to phonetics, native Chinese speakers have difficulty perceiving and producing mainly four consonant groups: bilabial consonants; velar consonants; liquid consonants, and lingual consonants (Flege 1995; Yang 2014; Diana 2016; Qiaoni 2018; Adrinao 2020). However, although there are several studies in the field of phonetics that point to this phenomenon, the research developed so far lacks solutions to this difficulty. In the present paper, the impact of the aforementioned limitation is analyzed in two different ways: starting from the context of Portuguese phonetic classes on the degree of improvement of Chinese students, and comparing it to the context of Portuguese phonetic classes in universities in China and Portugal. The final comparison of students' competence was made by applying perception and production tests to 24 Chinese students. The tests were applied at two different times, with a three-month interval between them. The sample consisted of three groups, aged between 20 and 24 years, with a Portuguese language level between B1 and B2. Two of the groups received phonetic courses in China or Portugal, and the third group was a control group. The latter group did not receive phonetic courses, but lived in Portugal at the time of the study, serving as a reference for the influence of language environment on phonetics. In this paper, we investigate the study of Portuguese phonetics with the aims of: 1) understanding the effect of having or not having phonetic classes on Chinese students in the same language environment, and 2) comparing the performance of students who had phonetic classes in China or Portugal. It is important to note that the pandemic context limited the development of the research work, so the results can only be used as a reference. The data obtained show that there are many students who, despite living in Portugal, have little contact with the Portuguese language, except in the context of classes, shopping and traveling. The results also point to the fact that phonetics classes in Portuguese universities help Chinese students to improve their performance in Portuguese, filling the gaps in their knowledge in China, resulting in an improvement of their perception skills and, consequently, pronunciation, but this varies from person to person. Finally, in this research, it is observed that phonetic classes in Chinese universities are targeted towards students with difficulties, so that they can improve faster. However, students in the Chinese context do not perform as well as those studying in Portugal and still have difficulty perceiving and producing the consonants under observation

Ultimate boundary estimations and topological horseshoe analysis of a new 4D hyper-chaotic system

In this paper, we first estimate the boundedness of a new proposed 4-dimensional (4D) hyper-chaotic system with complex dynamical behaviors. For this system, the ultimate bound set Ω1 and globally exponentially attractive set Ω2 are derived based on the optimization method, Lyapunov stability theory and comparison principle. Numerical simulations are presented to show the effectiveness of the method and the boundary regions. Then, to prove the existence of hyper-chaos, the hyper-chaotic dynamics of the 4D nonlinear system is investigated by means of topological horseshoe theory and numerical computation. Based on the algorithm for finding horseshoes in three-dimensional hyper-chaotic maps, we finally find a horseshoe with two-directional expansions in the 4D hyper-chaotic system, which can rigorously prove the existence of the hyper-chaos in theory

A towards-multidimensional screening approach to predict candidate genes of rheumatoid arthritis based on SNP, structural and functional annotations

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>According to the Genetic Analysis Workshops (GAW), hundreds of thousands of SNPs have been tested for association with rheumatoid arthritis. Traditional genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been developed to identify susceptibility genes using a "most significant SNPs/genes" model. However, many minor- or modest-risk genes are likely to be missed after adjustment of multiple testing. This screening process uses a strict selection of statistical thresholds that aim to identify susceptibility genes based only on statistical model, without considering multi-dimensional biological similarities in sequence arrangement, crystal structure, or functional categories/biological pathways between candidate and known disease genes.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Multidimensional screening approaches combined with traditional statistical genetics methods can consider multiple biological backgrounds of genetic mutation, structural, and functional annotations. Here we introduce a newly developed multidimensional screening approach for rheumatoid arthritis candidate genes that considers all SNPs with nominal evidence of Bayesian association (<it>BFLn > 0</it>), and structural and functional similarities of corresponding genes or proteins.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our multidimensional screening approach extracted all risk genes (<it>BFLn > 0</it>) by odd ratios of hypothesis H₁to H₀, and determined whether a particular group of genes shared underlying biological similarities with known disease genes. Using this method, we found 6614 risk SNPs in our Bayesian screen result set. Finally, we identified 146 likely causal genes for rheumatoid arthritis, including CD4, FGFR1, and KDR, which have been reported as high risk factors by recent studies. We must denote that 790 (96.1%) of genes identified by GWAS could not easily be classified into related functional categories or biological processes associated with the disease, while our candidate genes shared underlying biological similarities (<it>e.g</it>. were in the same pathway or GO term) and contributed to disease etiology, but where common variations in each of these genes make modest contributions to disease risk. We also found 6141 risk SNPs that were too minor to be detected by conventional approaches, and associations between 58 candidate genes and rheumatoid arthritis were verified by literature retrieved from the NCBI PubMed module.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our proposed approach to the analysis of GAW16 data for rheumatoid arthritis was based on an underlying biological similarities-based method applied to candidate and known disease genes. Application of our method could identify likely causal candidate disease genes of rheumatoid arthritis, and could yield biological insights that not detected when focusing only on genes that give the strongest evidence by multiple testing. We hope that our proposed method complements the "most significant SNPs/genes" model, and provides additional insights into the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases, when searching datasets for hundreds of genetic variances.</p

Demonstration-based learning for few-shot biomedical named entity recognition under machine reading comprehension

Although deep learning techniques have shown significant achievements, they frequently depend on extensive amounts of hand-labeled data and tend to perform inadequately in few-shot scenarios. The objective of this study is to devise a strategy that can improve the model's capability to recognize biomedical entities in scenarios of few-shot learning. By redefining biomedical named entity recognition (BioNER) as a machine reading comprehension (MRC) problem, we propose a demonstration-based learning method to address few-shot BioNER, which involves constructing appropriate task demonstrations. In assessing our proposed method, we compared the proposed method with existing advanced methods using six benchmark datasets, including BC4CHEMD, BC5CDR-Chemical, BC5CDR-Disease, NCBI-Disease, BC2GM, and JNLPBA. We examined the models' efficacy by reporting F1 scores from both the 25-shot and 50-shot learning experiments. In 25-shot learning, we observed 1.1% improvements in the average F1 scores compared to the baseline method, reaching 61.7%, 84.1%, 69.1%, 70.1%, 50.6%, and 59.9% on six datasets, respectively. In 50-shot learning, we further improved the average F1 scores by 1.0% compared to the baseline method, reaching 73.1%, 86.8%, 76.1%, 75.6%, 61.7%, and 65.4%, respectively. We reported that in the realm of few-shot learning BioNER, MRC-based language models are much more proficient in recognizing biomedical entities compared to the sequence labeling approach. Furthermore, our MRC-language models can compete successfully with fully-supervised learning methodologies that rely heavily on the availability of abundant annotated data. These results highlight possible pathways for future advancements in few-shot BioNER methodologies

Role of Translationally Controlled Tumor Protein in Cancer Progression

Translationally controlled tumor protein (TCTP) is a highly conserved and ubiquitously expressed protein in all eukaryotes—highlighting its important functions in the cell. Previous studies revealed that TCTP is implicated in many biological processes, including cell growth, tumor reversion, and induction of pluripotent stem cell. A recent study on the solution structure from fission yeast orthologue classifies TCTP under a family of small chaperone proteins. There is growing evidence in the literature that TCTP is a multifunctional protein and exerts its biological activity at the extracellular and intracellular levels. Although TCTP is not a tumor-specific protein, our research group, among several others, focused on the role(s) of TCTP in cancer progression. In this paper, we will summarize the current scientific knowledge of TCTP in different aspects, and the precise oncogenic mechanisms of TCTP will be discussed in detail

SoccerDB: A Large-Scale Database for Comprehensive Video Understanding

Soccer videos can serve as a perfect research object for video understanding because soccer games are played under well-defined rules while complex and intriguing enough for researchers to study. In this paper, we propose a new soccer video database named SoccerDB, comprising 171,191 video segments from 346 high-quality soccer games. The database contains 702,096 bounding boxes, 37,709 essential event labels with time boundary and 17,115 highlight annotations for object detection, action recognition, temporal action localization, and highlight detection tasks. To our knowledge, it is the largest database for comprehensive sports video understanding on various aspects. We further survey a collection of strong baselines on SoccerDB, which have demonstrated state-of-the-art performances on independent tasks. Our evaluation suggests that we can benefit significantly when jointly considering the inner correlations among those tasks. We believe the release of SoccerDB will tremendously advance researches around comprehensive video understanding. {\itshape Our dataset and code published on https://github.com/newsdata/SoccerDB.}Comment: accepted by MM2020 sports worksho