Cultural Differences between China and America in the International Negotiations under the Cultural Dimensions

As the booming development of the world economy, it is inevitable for all countries to talk with each other and dialogues among different countries have become a new normal. As the two largest economies in the world, China and the United States hold talks more frequently. On the surface, it seems that the talks are just a psychological fight or game among the participating negotiators. However, it is a fact that the negotiations are about a collision between different cultures. Due to cultural differences, different performances have been made during the process of talks and have affected the quality and efficiency of the dialogue to a great degree. Based on the cultural dimensions, this paper will focus on studying the styles of Chinese and American negotiators on expression, the value of time, decision making and the final goal in the negotiations from the perspective of the dimensions, individualism-collectivism dimension and long-term and short-term index dimension, so as to provide some suggestions for the Chinese negotiators and provide a reference for achieving mutually beneficial international dialogues

A class of monotonicity-preserving variable-step discretizations for Volterra integral equations with completely monotone kernels

The time continuous Volterra equations valued in $\mathbb{R}$ with completely monotone kernels have two basic monotone properties. The first is that any two solution curves do not intersect if the given signal has a monotone property. The second is that the solutions to the autonomous equations are monotone. The so-called CM-preserving schemes (Comm. Math. Sci., 2021,19(5), 1301-1336) have been shown to preserve these properties but they are restricted to uniform meshes. In this work, through the an analogue of the convolution on nonuniform meshes, we introduce the concept of ``right quasi-completely monotone'' (R-QCM) kernels for nonuniform meshes, which is a generalization of the CM-preserving schemes. We prove that the discrete solutions preserve these two monotone properties if the discretized kernel satisfies R-QCM property. Technically, we highly rely on the so-called resolvent kernels to achieve this

Identifying Conspiracy Theories News based on Event Relation Graph

Conspiracy theories, as a type of misinformation, are narratives that explains an event or situation in an irrational or malicious manner. While most previous work examined conspiracy theory in social media short texts, limited attention was put on such misinformation in long news documents. In this paper, we aim to identify whether a news article contains conspiracy theories. We observe that a conspiracy story can be made up by mixing uncorrelated events together, or by presenting an unusual distribution of relations between events. Achieving a contextualized understanding of events in a story is essential for detecting conspiracy theories. Thus, we propose to incorporate an event relation graph for each article, in which events are nodes, and four common types of event relations, coreference, temporal, causal, and subevent relations, are considered as edges. Then, we integrate the event relation graph into conspiracy theory identification in two ways: an event-aware language model is developed to augment the basic language model with the knowledge of events and event relations via soft labels; further, a heterogeneous graph attention network is designed to derive a graph embedding based on hard labels. Experiments on a large benchmark dataset show that our approach based on event relation graph improves both precision and recall of conspiracy theory identification, and generalizes well for new unseen media sources.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2023 Finding

Discourse Structures Guided Fine-grained Propaganda Identification

Propaganda is a form of deceptive narratives that instigate or mislead the public, usually with a political purpose. In this paper, we aim to identify propaganda in political news at two fine-grained levels: sentence-level and token-level. We observe that propaganda content is more likely to be embedded in sentences that attribute causality or assert contrast to nearby sentences, as well as seen in opinionated evaluation, speculation and discussions of future expectation. Hence, we propose to incorporate both local and global discourse structures for propaganda discovery and construct two teacher models for identifying PDTB-style discourse relations between nearby sentences and common discourse roles of sentences in a news article respectively. We further devise two methods to incorporate the two types of discourse structures for propaganda identification by either using teacher predicted probabilities as additional features or soliciting guidance in a knowledge distillation framework. Experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that leveraging guidance from discourse structures can significantly improve both precision and recall of propaganda content identification.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 202

Antiaging Effect of Inula britannica

The antiaging effect of Inula britannica flower total flavonoids (IBFTF) on aging mice induced by D-galactose and its mechanism was examined in this study. From the results, the biochemical indexes and histological analysis of skin tissues showed that IBFTF could effectively improve the antioxidant enzyme activity of the aging mice, enhance the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), and glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) of skin tissue, and decrease the malondialdehyde (MDA) content. Besides, IBFTF could maintain the skin collagen, hydroxyproline (Hyp), dermal thickness, and moisture content. Meanwhile, IBFTF could significantly reduce the number of cells arrested in G0/G1 phase, and from the point of view of protein and mRNA expression level in skin tissue, IBFTF could significantly increase the expression of Sirt1 and CyclinD1 but decrease the expression of p16 and p21, and its effect was not less than that of the well-known vitamin E (VE). Overall, these results seem to be implying that IBFTF is a potential natural anti-skin aging agent with great antioxidant ability