Improved Chinese Language Processing for an Open Source Search Engine

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the process of computers analyzing on human languages. There are also many areas in NLP. Some of the areas include speech recognition, natural language understanding, and natural language generation. Information retrieval and natural language processing for Asians languages has its own unique set of challenges not present for Indo-European languages. Some of these are text segmentation, named entity recognition in unsegmented text, and part of speech tagging. In this report, we describe our implementation of and experiments with improving the Chinese language processing sub-component of an open source search engine, Yioop. In particular, we rewrote and improved the following sub-systems of Yioop to try to make them as state-of-the-art as possible: Chinese text segmentation, Part-of-speech (POS) tagging, Named Entity Recognition (NER), and Question and Answering System. Compared to the previous system we had a 9% improvement on Chinese words Segmentation accuracy. We built POS tagging with 89% accuracy. And We implement NER System with 76% accuracy

Modeling of Causes of Sina Weibo Continuance Intention with Mediation of Gender Effects

Sina Weibo is a Twitter-like social networking site and one of the most popular microblogging services in China. This study aims to examine the factors that influence the intentions of users to continue using this site. This paper synthesizes the expectation confirmation model (ECM), constructs of habit and perceived critical mass, and the gender effect to construct a theoretical model to explain and predict these user intentions. The model is then tested via an online survey of 498 Sina Weibo users and partial least squares (PLS) modeling. The results indicate that the continuance intention of users is directly predicted by their perceived usefulness of the service (β=0.299), their satisfaction (β=0.208), and their habits (β=0.389), which jointly explain 65.9% of the variance in intention. In addition to the effects of these predictors on the continuance intentions of Sina Weibo users, an assessment of the moderating effect of gender suggests that habit plays a more important role for females than for males in continuance intention, but perceived usefulness seems to be more important for males than for females. The implications of these findings are then discussed

An Empirical Study on the Smallest Comfortable Button/Icon Size on Touch Screen

For the convenience of firefighters’ decision-making and operation, touch screen display was chosen as the preferred interface for a fire information display system. Few studies were conducted to determine comfortable button/icon size on touch screens. This experiment investigated the effect of four factors on operators’ performance with touch screen: 1) button size (20*20, 30*30, 40*40, and 50*50 pixels 2), spacing between buttons (0, 5, 10, and 20 pixels), 3) button/icon types (digit buttons only, picture icons only, combination), and 4) glove wearing (wearing vs. not wearing). 14 males were asked to accomplish a series of matching tasks on touch screen with the forefinger of right hand. Results showed that the spacing between buttons/icons, and wearing or not wearing a glove did not affect performance. Subjects pointed to the digit buttons faster than the other two kinds of buttons/icons. There was a significant difference among button/icon sizes. People performed best when it was equal to or bigger than 40*40 pixels

COOOL: A Learning-To-Rank Approach for SQL Hint Recommendations

Query optimization is a pivotal part of every database management system (DBMS) since it determines the efficiency of query execution. Numerous works have introduced Machine Learning (ML) techniques to cost modeling, cardinality estimation, and end-to-end learned optimizer, but few of them are proven practical due to long training time, lack of interpretability, and integration cost. A recent study provides a practical method to optimize queries by recommending per-query hints but it suffers from two inherited problems. First, it follows the regression framework to predict the absolute latency of each query plan, which is very challenging because the latencies of query plans for a certain query may span multiple orders of magnitude. Second, it requires training a model for each dataset, which restricts the application of the trained models in practice. In this paper, we propose COOOL to predict Cost Orders of query plans to cOOperate with DBMS by Learning-To-Rank. Instead of estimating absolute costs, COOOL uses ranking-based approaches to compute relative ranking scores of the costs of query plans. We show that COOOL is theoretically valid to distinguish query plans with different latencies. We implement COOOL on PostgreSQL, and extensive experiments on join-order-benchmark and TPC-H data demonstrate that COOOL outperforms PostgreSQL and state-of-the-art methods on single-dataset tasks as well as a unified model for multiple-dataset tasks. Our experiments also shed some light on why COOOL outperforms regression approaches from the representation learning perspective, which may guide future research

A Research of Speech Signal of Fire Information Display Interface

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of speech rate and tune on intelligibility of fire information words and sentences under the conditions with different levels of noise. The result showed that the types of signals and noise levels affect the intelligibility significantly .The appropriate tune for fire information display interface is mezzo-soprano. The appropriate voice rate is 5 characters per second for words display, 7 characters per second for usual sentences display and 6 characters per second for the sentences with numbers display

Minimum wage effects on employment and working time of Chinese workers - evidence based on CHNS

While minimum wage shortens the average working hours for employed workers, it does not have significant effect on the relative working times for different income groups. These findings may imply some beneficial effects of the minimum wage policies for Chinese workers. The paper examines the impact of minimum wage policies on employment, income, and working time of Chinese workers. Using data from China Health and Nutrition Survey, the focus is on identifying the effects of minimum wage adjustments using a pre-specified model

Culturel difference in structure of categories in Denmark and China

There is a difference in how Danish and Chinese people group object, method and concepts into categories. Difference in these points affect the information structure in applications, which involve menus, links and directories. This study involves groups from Chinese and Danish cultures and investigates how these two cultures group cards into different categories and how their cultural backgrounds affect the structure of their categories. Card Sort, Information Structure, Cultural Difference and Usability

The effectiveness of Interpersonal Psychotherapy-Adolescent Skills Training for adolescents with depression: a systematic review and meta-analysis

BackgroundInterpersonal Psychotherapy-Adolescent Skills Training (IPT-AST) is a standardized depression prevention program for adolescents conducted in campus settings. The purpose of this review is to examine the randomized controlled trials of IPT-AST for the prevention of adolescent depression in the past 20 years.MethodsA systematic search of relevant electronic databases (PubMed, WOS, Embase, PsycINFO, the Cochrane Library, CNKI and WANFANG DATA) and study reference lists was conducted. Any study investigating the effectiveness of IPT-AST in 12- to 20-year-olds with depressive symptoms was eligible. Synthesis was via narrative summary and meta-analysis.ResultsA total of 6 studies met the inclusion criteria. Meta-analysis results showed a remarkable improvement in patients’ depressive symptoms after IPT-AST intervention (WMD = −5.05, 95% CI = −8.11 to −1.98, p < 0.05, I2 = 77%). Six month follow-up data showed that the intervention outcomes of IPT-AST remained significant (WMD = −3.09, 95% CI: −5.23 to −0.94, p < 0.05, I2 = 57%).ConclusionThis meta-analysis showed that IPT-AST was effective in adolescents with depressive symptoms at post-prevention and at 6-month follow-up. However, these conclusions are cautious, as they are based on a small number of studies and the presence of author duplication. Future studies should use multi-center, large-sample randomized controlled trials to evaluate the efficacy of IPT-AST for preventing depression in adolescents.Systematic review registrationhttps://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/, identifier CRD42023393047