Derivational Complexity in EFL Learners’ Development of Bi-clausal Wh-questions

This paper aims to investigate Korean learners’ interlanguage with respect to the production of English bi-clausal wh-questions. One hundred seven adult Korean-speaking learners of English in three proficiency groups took part in a production task designed to elicit English bi-clausal wh-questions. The study specifically asked what interlanguage structures Korean EFL learners would produce and whether the structures would change as learners’ English proficiency advances. The results revealed that Korean EFL learners produced a range of alternative bi-clausal structures, including wh-scope marking, silent scope marking, wh-scope marking with embedded wh-in-situ, L1 clause order, and wh-about-wh type constructions. Comparison of three proficiency groups showed that as the learners’ English proficiency increases, they tend to produce an increasing number of derivationally more complex alternatives. It is argued that derivational complexity plays a role in the developmental process of Korean EFL learners’ interlanguage for bi-clausal wh-questions

125 GeV Higgs as a pseudo-Goldstone boson in supersymmetry with vector-like matters

We propose a possibility of the 125 GeV Higgs being a pseudo-Goldstone boson in supersymmetry with extra vector-like fermions. Higgs mass is obtained from loops of top quark and vector-like fermions from the global symmetry breaking scale f at around TeV. The mu, Bmu/mu \sim f are generated from the dynamics of global symmetry breaking and the Higgs quartic coupling vanishes at f as tan beta \simeq 1. The relation of msoft \sim $4\pi M_Z$ with f \sim mu \sim m_soft \sim TeV is obtained and large mu does not cause a fine tuning for the electroweak symmetry breaking. The Higgs to di-photon rate can be enhanced from the loop of uncolored vector-like matters. The stability problem of Higgs potential with vector-like fermions can be nicely cured by the UV completion with the Goldstone picture.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figure

Anti-anxiety effect of methanol extract of Pericarpium zanthoxyli using a strychnine-sensitive glycine receptor model

Purpose: To determine if the methanol extract of Pericarpium zanthoxyli exerts anti-anxiety effects and also to explore any probable anti-anxiety mechanism in vivo.Methods: The staircase test, elevated plus maze test, rota-rod treadmill test and convulsions induced by strychnine and picrotoxin on mice were tested to identify potential mechanism of anti-anxiety activity of the plant extract.Results: The plant extract (10 mg/kg, p.o.) significantly reduced rearing numbers in the staircase test while it increased the time spent in the open arms as well as the number of entries to the open arms in the elevated plus maze test, suggesting that it has significant anti-anxiety activity. Furthermore, the extract inhibited strychnine-induced convulsion. However, it had little effect on picrotoxin-induced convulsion, suggesting that its anti-anxiety activity may be linked to strychnine-sensitive glycine receptor and not GABA receptor.Conclusion: These results suggest that the Pericarpium zanthoxyli extract may be beneficial for the control of anxiety.Keywords: Anti-anxiety, Pericarpium zanthoxyli, Glycine Receptor, GABA Recepto

Click-aware purchase prediction with push at the top

Eliciting user preferences from purchase records for performing purchase prediction is challenging because negative feedback is not explicitly observed, and because treating all non-purchased items equally as negative feedback is unrealistic. Therefore, in this study, we present a framework that leverages the past click records of users to compensate for the missing user-item interactions of purchase records, i.e., non-purchased items. We begin by formulating various model assumptions, each one assuming a different order of user preferences among purchased, clicked-but-not-purchased, and non-clicked items, to study the usefulness of leveraging click records. We implement the model assumptions using the Bayesian personalized ranking model, which maximizes the area under the curve for bipartite ranking. However, we argue that using click records for bipartite ranking needs a meticulously designed model because of the relative unreliableness of click records compared with that of purchase records. Therefore, we ultimately propose a novel learning-to-rank method, called P3Stop, for performing purchase prediction. The proposed model is customized to be robust to relatively unreliable click records by particularly focusing on the accuracy of top-ranked items. Experimental results on two real-world e-commerce datasets demonstrate that P3STop considerably outperforms the state-of-the-art implicit-feedback-based recommendation methods, especially for top-ranked items.Comment: For the final published journal version, see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2020.02.06

Study of the Top-quark Pair Production in Association with a Bottom-quark Pair from Fast Simulations at the LHC

A large number of top quarks will be produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for Run II period. This will allow us to measure the rare processes from the top sector in great details. We present the study of the top-quark pair production in association with a bottom-quark pair (ttbb) from fast simulations for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. The differential distributions of ttbb are compared with the top-quark pair production with two additional jets (ttjj) and with the production in association with the Higgs (ttH), where the Higgs decays to a bottom-quark pair. The significances of ttbb process in the dileptonic and semileptonic decay mode are calculated with the data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 10 fb-1, which is foreseen to be collected in the early Run II period. This study will be an important input in searching for new physics beyond the standard model as well as in searching for ttH process where the Yukawa coupling with the top quark can be directly measured.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figure