Semantic Service Description Framework for Efficient Service Discovery and Composition

Web services have been widely adopted as a new distributed system technology by industries in the areas of, enterprise application integration, business process management, and virtual organisation. However, lack of semantics in current Web services standards has been a major barrier in the further improvement of service discovery and composition. For the last decade, Semantic Web Services have become an important research topic to enrich the semantics of Web services. The key objective of Semantic Web Services is to achieve automatic/semi-automatic Web service discovery, invocation, and composition. There are several existing semantic Web service description frameworks, such as, OWL-S, WSDL-S, and WSMF. However, existing frameworks have several issues, such as insufficient service usage context information, precisely specified requirements needed to locate services, lacking information about inter-service relationships, and insufficient/incomplete information handling, make the process of service discovery and composition not as efficient as it should be. To address these problems, a context-based semantic service description framework is proposed in this thesis. This framework focuses on not only capabilities of Web services, but also the usage context information of Web services, which we consider as an important factor in efficient service discovery and composition. Based on this framework, an enhanced service discovery mechanism is proposed. It gives service users more flexibility to search for services in more natural ways rather than only by technical specifications of required services. The service discovery mechanism also demonstrates how the features provided by the framework can facilitate the service discovery and composition processes. Together with the framework, a transformation method is provided to transform exiting service descriptions into the new framework based descriptions. The framework is evaluated through a scenario based analysis in comparison with OWL-S and a prototype based performance evaluation in terms of query response time, the precision and recall ratio, and system scalability

ProphetMT: a tree-based SMT-driven controlled language authoring/post-editing tools

This paper presents ProphetMT, a tree-based SMT-driven Controlled Language (CL) authoring and post-editing tool. ProphetMT employs the source-side rules in a translation model and provides them as auto-suggestions to users. Accordingly, one might say that users are writing in a ‘Controlled Language’ that is ‘understood’ by the computer. ProphetMT also allows users to easily attach structural information as they compose content. When a specific rule is selected, a partial translation is promptly generated on-the-fly with the help of the structural information. Our experiments conducted on English-to-Chinese show that our proposed ProphetMT system can not only better regularise an author’s writing behaviour, but also significantly improve translation fluency which is vital to reduce the post-editing time. Additionally, when the writing and translation process is over, ProphetMT can provide an effective colour scheme to further improve the productivity of post-editors by explicitly featuring the relations between the source and target rules

El rol de la motivación en los efectos de las relaciones profesor-estudiante en el rendimiento de la lengua extranjera

The present study investigated whether students’ motivational beliefs act as a mediator in the association between teacher-student relationships (TSRs) and foreign language performance with a multiple mediation model. Furthermore, this research examined whether mediating roles of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation differ. A total of 1171 eighth graders (583 male, 588 female) were chosen with purposive sampling in China. Studentreported measures of TSRs, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) test based on national curriculum were administrated in October 2017. Results showed that the positive link between TSRs and foreign language performance is partially mediated by intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and the mediation effect of intrinsic motivation is significantly greater than that of extrinsic motivation, controlling for gender and socio-economic status. The results indicated that supportive TSRs can help learners to improve their foreign language proficiency by promoting their motivation, especially intrinsic motivation. The present results may have substantive theoretical and practical implications for teacher education and foreign language learning.El presente estudio investigó si las creencias motivacionales de los estudiantes actúan como mediadores en la asociación entre las relaciones profesor-alumno (TSR) y el rendimiento de un idioma extranjero con un modelo de mediación múltiple. Además, esta investigación examinó si los roles mediadores de la motivación intrínseca y extrínseca difieren. Se eligieron 1171 alumnos de octavo grado (583 hombres, 588 mujeres) con muestreo intencional en China. En octubre de 2017, se aplicaron a los estudiantes las pruebas de TSR, la motivación intrínseca y extrínseca y la prueba de inglés como idioma extranjero (EFL) basadas en el plan de estudios nacional. Los resultados mostraron que el vínculo positivo entre TSR y el desempeño de un idioma extranjero está parcialmente mediado por la motivación intrínseca y extrínseca, y el efecto de mediación de la motivación intrínseca es significativamente mayor que el de la motivación extrínseca, controlando el género y el estatus socioeconómico. Los resultados indicaron que los TSR de apoyo pueden ayudar a los alumnos a mejorar su dominio del idioma extranjero ya que promueven su motivación, especialmente la motivación intrínseca. Los resultados actuales pueden tener importantes implicaciones teóricas y prácticas para la formación del profesorado y el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras.&nbsp

El rol de la motivación en los efectos de las relaciones profesor-estudiante en el rendimiento de la lengua extranjera

The present study investigated whether students’ motivational beliefs act as a mediator in the association between teacher-student relationships (TSRs) and foreign language performance with a multiple mediation model. Furthermore, this research examined whether mediating roles of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation differ. A total of 1171 eighth graders (583 male, 588 female) were chosen with purposive sampling in China. Studentreported measures of TSRs, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) test based on national curriculum were administrated in October 2017. Results showed that the positive link between TSRs and foreign language performance is partially mediated by intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and the mediation effect of intrinsic motivation is significantly greater than that of extrinsic motivation, controlling for gender and socio-economic status. The results indicated that supportive TSRs can help learners to improve their foreign language proficiency by promoting their motivation, especially intrinsic motivation. The present results may have substantive theoretical and practical implications for teacher education and foreign language learning.El presente estudio investigó si las creencias motivacionales de los estudiantes actúan como mediadores en la asociación entre las relaciones profesor-alumno (TSR) y el rendimiento de un idioma extranjero con un modelo de mediación múltiple. Además, esta investigación examinó si los roles mediadores de la motivación intrínseca y extrínseca difieren. Se eligieron 1171 alumnos de octavo grado (583 hombres, 588 mujeres) con muestreo intencional en China. En octubre de 2017, se aplicaron a los estudiantes las pruebas de TSR, la motivación intrínseca y extrínseca y la prueba de inglés como idioma extranjero (EFL) basadas en el plan de estudios nacional. Los resultados mostraron que el vínculo positivo entre TSR y el desempeño de un idioma extranjero está parcialmente mediado por la motivación intrínseca y extrínseca, y el efecto de mediación de la motivación intrínseca es significativamente mayor que el de la motivación extrínseca, controlando el género y el estatus socioeco-nómico. Los resultados indicaron que los TSR de apoyo pueden ayudar a los alumnos a mejorar su dominio del idioma extranjero ya que promueven su motivación, especialmente la motivación intrínseca. Los resultados actuales pueden tener importantes implicaciones teóricas y prácticas para la formación del profesorado y el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjera

The Dynamic Properties of Carbonate Sands from Seabed

Four kind of carbonate sands from offshore seabed together with LB sand of U.K and Fujian sand of China were tested with the Resonant Column method. The results show that the stress strain relationship in the condition of small strain can be represented with the hyperbolic model. The modulus is less than that of general sand. The cementing strength between particles of carbonate sands is weak. The breakage of particles is easy after disturbed and the density, therefore, will be increased. These properties should be further studied for engineering purpose

ProphetMT: controlled language authoring aid system description

This paper presents ProphetMT, a monolingual Controlled Language (CL) authoring tool which allows users to easily compose an in-domain sentence with the help of tree-based SMT-driven auto-suggestions. The interface also visualizes target-language sentences as they are built by the SMT system. When the user is finished composing, the final translation(s) are generated by a tree-based SMT system using the text and structural information provided by the user. With this domain-specific controlled language, ProphetMT will produce highly reliable translations. The contributions of this work are: 1) we develop a user-friendly auto-completion-based editor which guarantees that the vocabulary and grammar chosen by a user are compatible with a tree-based SMT model; 2) by applying a shift-reduce-like parsing feature, this editor allows users to write from left-to-right and generates the parsing results on the fly. Accordingly, with this in-domain composing restriction as well as the gold-standard parsing result, a highly reliable translation can be generated

NMR Spectra Denoising with Vandermonde Constraints

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy serves as an important tool to analyze chemicals and proteins in bioengineering. However, NMR signals are easily contaminated by noise during the data acquisition, which can affect subsequent quantitative analysis. Therefore, denoising NMR signals has been a long-time concern. In this work, we propose an optimization model-based iterative denoising method, CHORD-V, by treating the time-domain NMR signal as damped exponentials and maintaining the exponential signal form with a Vandermonde factorization. Results on both synthetic and realistic NMR data show that CHORD-V has a superior denoising performance over typical Cadzow and rQRd methods, and the state-of-the-art CHORD method. CHORD-V restores low-intensity spectral peaks more accurately, especially when the noise is relatively high.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure