A currency union or an exchange rate union: evidence from Northeast Asia

This paper examines whether or not Northeast Asia economies, namely, China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, can form a currency union, where a single currency and a uniform monetary policy are adopted, or an exchange rate union where all the currencies are pegged to an internal or external currency or an optimum currency basket. The analysis of correlations of supply shocks, exchange rate shocks, monetary shocks, and demand shocks, which are estimated applying the structural VAR model with identification restrictions imposed, to the data for the period from 1970 through 2004, shows that shocks of these economies are not symmetric, in general, implying that the Northeast Asian economies are not ready yet to form a common currency union. However, it is found that the Northeast Asian countries can form an exchange rate union with a major currency basket, which consists of the U.S. dollar, the euro and the Japanese yen, as an anchor currency. The paper also examines the option of pegging to a basket of regional currencies, similar to the Asian Currency Unit (ACU), and discusses policy implications.currency union; exchange rate union; optimum currency areas; Northeast Asia

Matching Natural Language Sentences with Hierarchical Sentence Factorization

Semantic matching of natural language sentences or identifying the relationship between two sentences is a core research problem underlying many natural language tasks. Depending on whether training data is available, prior research has proposed both unsupervised distance-based schemes and supervised deep learning schemes for sentence matching. However, previous approaches either omit or fail to fully utilize the ordered, hierarchical, and flexible structures of language objects, as well as the interactions between them. In this paper, we propose Hierarchical Sentence Factorization---a technique to factorize a sentence into a hierarchical representation, with the components at each different scale reordered into a "predicate-argument" form. The proposed sentence factorization technique leads to the invention of: 1) a new unsupervised distance metric which calculates the semantic distance between a pair of text snippets by solving a penalized optimal transport problem while preserving the logical relationship of words in the reordered sentences, and 2) new multi-scale deep learning models for supervised semantic training, based on factorized sentence hierarchies. We apply our techniques to text-pair similarity estimation and text-pair relationship classification tasks, based on multiple datasets such as STSbenchmark, the Microsoft Research paraphrase identification (MSRP) dataset, the SICK dataset, etc. Extensive experiments show that the proposed hierarchical sentence factorization can be used to significantly improve the performance of existing unsupervised distance-based metrics as well as multiple supervised deep learning models based on the convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM).Comment: Accepted by WWW 2018, 10 page

The Photometric Investigation of V921 Her using the Lunar-based Ultraviolet Telescope of Chang'e-3 mission

The light curve of V921 Her in ultraviolet band observed by the Lunar-based Ultraviolet Telescope (LUT) is analyzed by the Wilson-Devinney code. Our solutions conclude that V921 Her is an early type marginal contact binary system with an additional close-in component. The binary system is under poor thermal contact with a temperature difference of nearly $700K$ between the two components. The close-in component contributes about $19\,\%$ of the total luminosity in the triple system. Combining the radial velocity study together with our photometric solutions, the mass of the primary star and secondary one are calculated to be $M_1 = 1.784(\pm0.055)M_\odot$, $M_2 = 0.403(\pm0.012)M_\odot$. The evolutionary scenario of V921 Her is discussed. All times of light minimum of V921 Her available in the bibliography are taken into account and the $O - C$ curve is analyzed for the first time. The most probable fitting results are discussed in the paper, which also confirm the existence of a third component ($P_3=10.2$ year) around the binary system. The period of V921 Her is also undergoing a continuously rapid increase at a rate of $dP/dt=+2.79\times{10^{-7}}day\cdot year^{-1}$, which may due to mass transfer from the less massive component to the more massive one