Retrospective turn continuations in Mandarin Chinese conversation

How the status of further talk past the point of a turn's possible completion should he described, and what functions different kinds of turn continuation might serve - these are questions that have engaged many scholars since Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson's turn-taking model (1974). In this paper, a general scheme is proposed with which one can tease out four interlocking strands in analyzing different kinds of turn continuation: Syntactic continuity vs. discontinuity, main vs. subordinate intonation, retrospective vs. prospective orientation, and information focus vs. non-focus. These parameters combine to form different configurations and interact in interesting ways, accounting for different kinds of turn continuation. The scheme is tested on, and illustrated with, a body of naturally occurring conversational data in Chinese.published_or_final_versio

Chinese unknown word identification as known word tagging

This paper presents a tagging approach to Chinese unknown word identification based on lexicalized hidden Markov models (LHMMs). In this work, Chinese unknown word identification is represented as a tagging task on a sequence of known words by introducing word-formation patterns and part-of-speech. Based on the lexicalized HMMs, a statistical tagger is further developed to assign each known word an appropriate tag that indicates its pattern in forming a word and the part-of-speech of the formed word. The experimental results on the Peking University corpus indicate that the use of lexicalization technique and the introduction of part-of-speech are helpful to unknown word identification. The experiment on the SIGHAN-PK open test data also shows that our system can achieve state-of-art performance.published_or_final_versio

Chinese named entity recognition using lexicalized HMMs

This paper presents a lexicalized HMM-based approach to Chinese named entity recognition (NER). To tackle the problem of unknown words, we unify unknown word identification and NER as a single tagging task on a sequence of known words. To do this, we first employ a known-word bigram-based model to segment a sentence into a sequence of known words, and then apply the uniformly lexicalized HMMs to assign each known word a proper hybrid tag that indicates its pattern in forming an entity and the category of the formed entity. Our system is able to integrate both the internal formation patterns and the surrounding contextual clues for NER under the framework of HMMs. As a result, the performance of the system can be improved without losing its efficiency in training and tagging. We have tested our system using different public corpora. The results show that lexicalized HMMs can substantially improve NER performance over standard HMMs. The results also indicate that character-based tagging (viz. the tagging based on pure single-character words) is comparable to and can even outperform the relevant known-word based tagging when a lexicalization technique is applied.postprin

Integrated approaches to prosodic word prediction for Chinese TTS

We focus on integrated prosodic word prediction for Chinese TTS. To avoid the problem of inconsistency between lexical words and prosodic words in Chinese, lexical word segmentation and prosodic word prediction are taken as one process instead of two independent tasks. Furthermore, two word-based approaches are proposed to drive this integrated prosodic word prediction: The first one follows the notion of lexicalized hidden Markov models, and the second one is borrowed from unknown word identification for Chinese. The results of our primary experiment show these integrated approaches are effective.published_or_final_versio

The subject condition in Cantonese

Open URL of the LFG'01 Proceedings - http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/6/lfg01.htmlThis paper discusses the subject condition with data from Cantonese. We show that it is not possible to identify subjects in this language based on morphosyntactic criteria alone, and in order to maintain the subject condition in Cantonese, a pro-drop language, one has to determine other ways of identifying subjects. We propose some ways in which subjects can be identified using the lexical mapping theory, augmented by pragmatic discourse criteria.published_or_final_versionThe 6th Internatinoal Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) Conference, Hong Kong, 25-27 June 2001. In Proceedings of LFG'01, 2001, p. 359-37

Language Use, Proficiency and Attitudes in Hong Kong

This study builds on the detailed empirical research of the three investigators, who have been collaborating on researching the Hong Kong linguistic situation since the early 1980s. This research utilises social survey methodology to investigate which languages are used within the community. In more technical terms, this has involved carrying out ‘sociolinguistic surveys’ (surveys of languages in society) to investigate which languages are learnt, and which are used, by whom to whom, across a range of settings (or ‘domains’) in Hong Kong society. Previously, three such surveys have been conducted, in 1983, 1993, and 2003. The 1983 sociolinguistic survey used faceto-face interviews with a total of 1240 respondents (Bolton and Luke 1999). This was followed, in 1993 and 2003, by two telephone surveys conducted by the Social Sciences Research Centre of The University of Hong Kong, where a total of 886 respondents were interviewed in the 1993 survey, and 1060 in the 2003 (Bacon-Shone and Bolton 1998, 2008). One broad aim of all three surveys was to describe patterns of language acquisition, language use, and attitudes to language policies in Hong Kong. This study carried out a sociolinguistic survey of Hong Kong in 2014 together with detailed reanalysis of the 2011 census data across the 18 districts and 412 constituency areas, which yields useful and applicable results relating to ethnic/linguistic minorities, multilingualism, multiculturalism, and language planning, of direct interest to public policy in Hong Kong. It also calibrates for the first time, using expert assessment, selfreported claims of proficiency in oral English and Putonghua and written English and simplified Chinese.published_or_final_versio

Chinese text chunking using lexicalized HMMS

This paper presents a lexicalized HMM-based approach to Chinese text chunking. To tackle the problem of unknown words, we formalize Chinese text chunking as a tagging task on a sequence of known words. To do this, we employ the uniformly lexicalized HMMs and develop a lattice-based tagger to assign each known word a proper hybrid tag, which involves four types of information: word boundary, POS, chunk boundary and chunk type. In comparison with most previous approaches, our approach is able to integrate different features such as part-of-speech information, chunk-internal cues and contextual information for text chunking under the framework of HMMs. As a result, the performance of the system can be improved without losing its efficiency in training and tagging. Our preliminary experiments on the PolyU Shallow Treebank show that the use of lexicalization technique can substantially improve the performance of a HMM-based chunking system. © 2005 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Broad and potent cross clade neutralizing antibodies with multiple specificities in the plasma of HIV-1 subtype C infected individuals.

Broadly Cross clade Neutralizing (BCN) antibodies are recognized as potential therapeutic tools and leads for the design of a vaccine that can protect human beings against various clades of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). In the present study, we screened plasma of 88 HIV-1 infected ART naïve individuals for their neutralization potential using a standard panel of 18 pseudoviruses belonging to different subtypes and different levels of neutralization. We identified 12 samples with good breadth of neutralization (neutralized >90% of the viruses). Four of these samples neutralized even the difficult-to-neutralize tier-3 pseudoviruses with great potency (GMT > 600). Analysis of neutralization specificities indicated that four samples had antibodies with multiple epitope binding specificities, viz. CD4-binding site (CD4BS), glycans in the V1/V2 and V3 regions and membrane proximal external region (MPER). Our findings indicate the strong possibility of identifying highly potent bNAbs with known or novel specificities from HIV-1 subtype C infected individuals from India that can be exploited as therapeutic tools or lead molecules for the identification of potential epitopes for design of a protective HIV-1 vaccine

A population-based study of effect of multiple birth on infant mortality in Nigeria

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Multi-foetal pregnancies and multiple births including twins and higher order multiples births such as triplets and quadruplets are high-risk pregnancy and birth. These high-risk groups contribute to the higher rate of childhood mortality especially during early period of life.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We examined the relationship between multiple births and infant mortality using univariable and multivariable survival regression procedure with Weibull hazard function, controlling for child's sex, birth order, prenatal care, delivery assistance; mother's age at child birth, nutritional status, education level; household living conditions and several other risk factors.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Children born multiple births were more than twice as likely to die during infancy as infants born singleton (hazard ratio = 2.19; 95% confidence interval: 1.50, 3.19) holding other factors constant. Maternal education and household asset index were associated with lower risk of infant mortality.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Multiple births are strongly negatively associated with infant survival in Nigeria independent of other risk factors. Mother's education played a protective role against infant death. This evidence suggests that improving maternal education may be key to improving child survival in Nigeria. A well-educated mother has a better chance of satisfying important factors that can improve infant survival: the quality of infant feeding, general care, household sanitation, and adequate use of preventive and curative health services.</p

Dislocations and the enhancement of superconductivity in odd-parity superconductor Sr2_2RuO4_4

We report observation of the enhancement of superconductivity near lattice dislocations and the absence of the strengthening of vortex pinning in odd-parity superconductor Sr$_2$RuO$_4$, both surprising results in direct contrast to the well known sensitivity of superconductivity in Sr$_2$RuO$_4$ to disorder. The enhanced superconductivity appears to be related fundamentally to the two-component nature of the superconducting order parameter, as revealed in our phenomenological theory taking into account the effect of symmetry reduction near a dislocation.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Physical Review Letter