Xin Li

Speech recognition by second language (L2) learners in optimal and suboptimal conditions has been examined extensively with English as the target language in most previous studies. This study extended existing experimental protocols ( Wang et al., 2013 ) to investigate Mandarin speech recognition by Japanese learners of Mandarin at two different levels (elementary vs. intermediate) of proficiency. The overall results showed that in addition to L2 proficiency, semantic context, F0 contours, and listening condition all affected the recognition performance on the Mandarin sentences. However, the effects of semantic context and F0 contours on L2 speech recognition diverged to some extent. Specifically, there was significant modulation effect of listening condition on semantic context, indicating that L2 learners made use of semantic context less efficiently in the interfering background than in quiet. In contrast, no significant modulation effect of listening condition on F0 contours was found. Furthermore, there was significant interaction between semantic context and F0 contours, indicating that semantic context becomes more important for L2 speech recognition when F0 information is degraded. None of these effects were found to be modulated by L2 proficiency. The discrepancy in the effects of semantic context and F0 contours on L2 speech recognition in the interfering background might be related to differences in processing capacities required by the two types of information in adverse listening conditions.

BackgroundLittle previous research has been conducted outside of major cities in China to examine how physicians currently perceive palliative care, and to identify specific goals for training as palliative care access expands. This study explored physicians’ perceptions of palliative care integration for advanced cancer patients in Changsha, China.MethodsWe conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with physicians (n = 24) specializing in hematology or oncology at a tertiary hospital.ResultsMost physicians viewed palliative care as equivalent to end-of-life care, while a minority considered it possible to integrate palliative care with active treatment. Almost all physicians maintained separate conversations about palliative care with family members and patients, communicating more directly with family members than with patients about prognosis and goals of care. Physicians described experiencing ethical tension between the desire of family members to protect the patient from knowing they have advanced cancer, and the patient’s “right to decide” about palliative treatment. Physicians varied overall regarding perceptions of the role they should have in discussions about goals of care.ConclusionsAs palliative care access expands in China, medical training should encourage earlier integration of palliative care for advanced cancer, address ethical issues faced by physicians communicating about palliative care, and establish guidance on the role of the physician in discussions about goals of care.

Emotional design is an important development trend of interaction design. Emotional design in products plays a key role in enhancing user experience and inducing user emotional resonance. In recent years, based on the user's emotional experience, the design concept of strengthening product emotional design has become a new direction for most designers to improve their design thinking. In the emotional interaction design, the machine needs to capture the user's key information in real time, recognize the user's emotional state, and use a variety of clues to finally determine the appropriate user model. Based on this background, this research uses a deep learning mechanism for more accurate and effective emotion recognition, thereby optimizing the design of the interactive system and improving the user experience. First of all, this research discusses how to use user characteristics such as speech, facial expression, video, heartbeat, etc., to make machines more accurately recognize human emotions. Through the analysis of various characteristics, the speech is selected as the experimental material. Second, a speech-based emotion recognition method is proposed. The mel-Frequency cepstral coefficient of the speech signal is used as the input of the improved long and short-term memory network. To ensure the integrity of the information and the accuracy of the output at the next moment, ILSTM makes peephole connections in the forget gate and input gate of LSTM, and adds the unit state as input data to the threshold layer. The emotional features obtained by ILSTM are input into the attention layer, and the self-attention mechanism is used to calculate the weight of each frame of speech signal. The speech features with higher weights are used to distinguish different emotions and complete the emotion recognition of the speech signal. Experiments on the EMO-DB and CASIA datasets verify the effectiveness of the model for emotion recognition. Finally, the feasibility of emotional interaction system design is discussed.

In recent years, many researchers have attempted to determine the mechanisms of how corporate social responsibility (CSR) brings financial benefits to a firm. However, many chief financial officers (CFOs) throughout the world are uncertain about the strategic value of CSR, and no consensus has been reached on defining how CSR creates value. Drawing on signaling theory, we explore the effects of the multidimensional construct of CSR on organizational performance by examining the relationships among CSR, corporate reputation, customer satisfaction, and organizational attractiveness from the perspectives of both customers as well as job seekers. Consistent with the European Commission's view, CSR is defined as having three components: CSR for employees, CSR for customers, and CSR for social public welfare. Data are collected through an online survey of a convenient sample of 500 individuals from different organizations in China. Results indicate that corporate reputation plays a mediating role in the relationship between CSR and customer satisfaction and that between CSR and organizational attractiveness. Further, the impact mechanisms of the three components of CSR are different. For CSR for employees, both cognitive and affective reputation work as mediators, with the former playing a bigger mediating role than the latter. For CSR for customers, only cognitive reputation works as a mediator, whereas for CSR for social public welfare, only affective reputation works as a mediator. This study's findings show that the abovementioned relationships are more complex than previous studies have revealed. These insights provide guidelines for firms to better adjust their CSR strategies to improve customer satisfaction and organizational attractiveness.

Judgment documents are the legally binding written conclusion made by the court based on the facts of the case and the law. Due to the use of professional terms and nested combinations of words, potential information of judgment documents has not been deeply excavated. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a necessary task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), and has been widely introduced into Chinese texts processing for many years. However, the professional terms and nested words lead to the boundaries between entities being blurred, which can not accurately divide entities. In this paper, a new NER model Adversarial Training Flat-Lattice Transformer (AT-Flat) which combines adversarial training and Flat-Lattice Transformer (Flat) is proposed to weaken these problems. In AT-Flat, the Flat combines character and word information to get sequence information, and the CRF is used to output the final entity prediction results. Moreover, the key point is an adversarial training framework introduced to integrate task-shared word boundary information from Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) task into Chinese NER task. The framework is able to filter out the noise caused by CWS task and further enhance the effect of Chinese NER task. More importantly, experiments on NER task of Chinese traffic accident and financial lending judgment documents show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. These verify that our method can effectively alleviate the problem of poor NER effect caused by professional terms and nested words. In addition, three public Chinese NER datasets were also used to evaluate our method.

Short circuit is a key factor which drastically affects the efficiency of metal electrorefining. Infrared image of the intercell busbar region is used to perform short circuit detection. To cope with the high thermal background, a two-level short circuit detection method is designed. Firstly, with background subtraction, high intensity short circuit electrodes, as well as the background, are removed, and normal working electrodes are preserved. In the second stage, suspicious short circuit areas are sifted out by normal electrode detecting and texture period estimation. Gaussian difference filter which is based on the human visual system is improved to match the target gray distribution. A comparative experiment indicates that the proposed orthogonal DoG outperforms the original DoG and top-hat in the accuracy of normal electrode detection. The two-level detection method in this paper is applied in a copper electrolysis plant and exhibits superiority in locating short circuits and avoiding miss detection.

This study investigates the impact of entrepreneurship education on college students’ entrepreneurial intentions, as well as the moderating effects of personality and family economic status on the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention, respectively. We tested our hypotheses using a sample of college students in Tianjin, China, and analyzed the data of 326 questionnaires containing validated measures. The results show that entrepreneurship education has a positive impact on college students’ entrepreneurial intentions; proactive personality negatively moderates this relationship; and family economic status positively moderates it. However, the moderating effect of narcissistic personality has not been verified. This study is unique and innovative as it brings new insights to this stream of literature by introducing the roles of the personality and family economic status in the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention. Our analysis provides important empirical evidence about the negative moderating effect of proactive personality and the positive moderating effect of family economic status on the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention, introducing insights into the heterogeneity of the effect of entrepreneurship education.

Research on justifications has shown their significance in advice-giving, decision-making and children disputes. However, the majority of studies gloss over practical functions of justifications in patient-physician interactions as they are often expected and pursued by patients and in turn, are adopted by physicians to support their stance and authority. This study, through conversation analysis (CA), aims to explore a) what are pragmatic functions of justifications in patient-physician interaction? b) how and when do physicians unfold their justifications for treatment recommendations? c) how do physicians deal with different responses based on their epistemic and deontic domains?. A total of 32 video-recordings between postpartum women and physicians are collected and studied. Four pragmatic functions of justifications drawn upon by physicians are explored: justifications as face-saving, reassurance, risk discussion and clarification-seeking. Despite physicians’ attempts to justify their positions as less challenged by patients, this is not the entire picture as they demonstrate their desire to resolve patients’ concerns and coordinate their viewpoints to achieve the best practice that facilitates patients’ well-being.

The eukaryotic genome is organized into different domains by cis‐acting elements, such as boundaries/insulators and matrix attachment regions, and is packaged with different degrees of condensation. In the M phase, the chromatin becomes further highly condensed into chromosomes. The first step for transcriptional activation of a given gene, at a particular time during development, in any locus, is the opening of its chromatin domain. This locus needs to be kept in this state in each early G1 phase during every cell cycle. Certain distal enhance elements, including locus control regions (LCRs) and enhancers, are believed to perform this target chromatin domain opening process and several models have been proposed to explain distal enhance action. But they did not explain precisely how a given chromatin domain is opened. Based on various studies, we propose a hypothesis for the mechanism of opening chromatin on a large scale. One important mechanism may involved breaking one or two DNA strands and reducing the linking numbers within chromatin domain. The topological changes can overpass some complexes formed on DNA strands and can be transmitted from specific localized points over a broad region, until boundary elements or insulators are reached. These may initiate downstream events such as propagation of histone acetylation and the binding of transcription factors to proximal promoters and may further augment the action mediated by distal enhancer elements. BioEssays 25:507–514, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

In order to better assess the mental health status, combining online text data and considering the problems of lexicon sparsity and small lexicon size in feature statistics of word frequency of the traditional linguistic inquiry and word count dictionary, and combining the advantages of constructive neural network convolutional neural network in contextual semantic extraction, a CNN-based mental health assessment method is proposed and evaluated with the measurement indicators in CLPsych2017. The results showed that the results obtained from the mental health assessment by CNN were superior in all indicators, in which F1 = 0.51 and ACC = 0.69. Meanwhile, ACC evaluated by FastText, CNN, and CNN + Word2Vec were 0.66, 0.67, 0.67, and F1 were 0.37, 0.47, and 0.49, respectively, which indicates the use of CNN in mental health assessment has feasibility.

This study aims to identify the relationship between students’ environmental value and pro-environmental behavior within a values-belief-norm framework. To conduct an empirical study, we used a sample of 558 online surveys and adopted the partial least squares path modeling method to test the relationships between variables in the conceptual model. The results indicate that EV positively predicted PEB among young adults. In addition, we highlight that risk perception and moral anger play critical chain mediating roles in the relationship between EV and PEB. This study has meaningful implications for practitioners seeking to encourage the public’s ecofriendly behavior by suggesting ways to encourage RP and stimulate individuals’ moral emotions about the environment.

Based on the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, this study explored the mediating effect of spiritual intelligence between awe and life satisfaction among Chinese primary school teachers and whether this effect was moderated by ethnicity. Participants comprised 569 teachers from 24 primary schools in southwestern China, where many of the ethnic minority groups of China reside. Awe and spiritual intelligence were found to positively predict life satisfaction among primary school teachers, while awe also indirectly influenced life satisfaction through the partial mediation of spiritual intelligence. Ethnicity was also found to moderate the relation between awe and life satisfaction, i.e., when compared with the Han teachers, there is a more significant and positive relation between awe and life satisfaction in ethnic minority teachers. These findings not only indicate the critical role of awe in promoting life satisfaction of primary school teachers but also especially show that awe embodied in the traditional cultural activities makes it easier to breed life satisfaction in ethnic minority teachers.

Different styles of social interaction are one of the core characteristics of autism spectrum disorder. Social differences among individuals with ASD often include difficulty in discerning the emotions of neurotypical people based on their facial expressions. This review first covers the rich body of literature studying differences in facial emotion recognition in those with ASD, including behavioral studies and neurological findings. In particular, we highlight subtle emotion recognition and various factors related to inconsistent findings in behavioral studies of FER in ASD. Then, we discuss the dual problem of FER – namely facial emotion expression or the production of facial expressions of emotion. Despite being less studied, social interaction involves both the ability to recognize emotions and to produce appropriate facial expressions. How others perceive facial expressions of emotion in those with ASD has remained an under-researched area. Finally, we propose a method for teaching FER [FER teaching hierarchy ] based on recent research investigating FER in ASD, considering the use of posed vs. genuine emotions and static vs. dynamic stimuli. We also propose two possible teaching approaches: a standard method of teaching progressively from simple drawings and cartoon characters to more complex audio-visual video clips of genuine human expressions of emotion with context clues or teaching in a field of images that includes posed and genuine emotions to improve generalizability before progressing to more complex audio-visual stimuli. Lastly, we advocate for autism interventionists to use FER stimuli developed primarily for research purposes to facilitate the incorporation of well-controlled stimuli to teach FER and bridge the gap between intervention and research in this area.

The economical/environmental scheduling problem of the ship integrated energy system has high computational complexity, which includes more than one optimization objective, various types of constraints, and frequently fluctuated load demand. Therefore, the intelligent scheduling strategies cannot be applied to the ship energy management system online, which has limited computing power and storage space. Aiming at realizing green computing on SEMS, in this paper a typical SIES-EESP optimization model is built, considering the form of decision vectors, the economical/environmental optimization objectives, and various types of real-world constraints of the SIES. Based on the complexity of SIES-EESPs, a two-stage offline-to-online multiobjective optimization strategy for SIES-EESP is proposed, which transfers part of the energy dispatch online computing task to the offline high-performance computer systems. The specific constraints handling methods are designed to reduce both continuous and discrete constraints violations of SIES-EESPs. Then, an establishment method of energy scheduling scheme-base is proposed. By using the big data offline, the economical/environmental scheduling solutions of a typical year can be obtained and stored with more computing resources and operation time on land. Thereafter, a short-term multiobjective offline-to-online optimization approach by SEMS is considered, with the application of multiobjective evolutionary algorithm and typical schemes corresponding to the actual SIES-EESPs. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy can obtain enough feasible Pareto solutions in a shorter time and get well-distributed Pareto sets with better convergence performance, which can well adapt to the features of real-world SIES-EESPs and save plenty of operation time and storage space for the SEMS.

In alphabetic writing systems (such as English), the spaces between words mark the word boundaries, and the basic unit of reading is distinguished during visual-level processing. The visual-level information of word boundaries facilitates reading. Chinese is an ideographic language whose text contains no intrinsic inter-word spaces as the marker of word boundaries. Previous studies have shown that the basic processing unit of Chinese reading is also a word. However, findings remain inconsistent regarding whether inserting spaces between words in Chinese text promotes reading performance. Researchers have proposed that there may be a trade-off between format familiarity and the facilitation effect of inter-word spaces. In order to verify this, this study manipulated the format familiarity via reversing the Chinese reading direction from right to left to investigate this issue in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. The purpose of Experiment 1 was to examine whether inter-word spaces facilitated Chinese reading in an unfamiliar format. Experiment 1 was conducted that 40 native Chinese undergraduates read Chinese sentences from right to left on four format conditions. The results showed faster reading speed and shorter total reading time for the inter-word spaced format. Based on this finding, Experiment 2 examined whether the facilitation effect of inter-word spaces would reduce or disappear after improving the format familiarity; this experiment was conducted that 40 native Chinese undergraduates who did not participate in Experiment 1 read Chinese sentences from right to left on four format conditions after ten-day reading training. There was no significant difference between the total reading time and reading speed in the inter-word spaced format and unspaced format, which suggests that the facilitation effect of inter-word spaces in Chinese reading changed smaller. The combined results of the two experiments suggest that there is indeed a trade-off between format familiarity and the facilitation of word segmentation, which supports the assumption of previous studies.

Facial expressions of emotion play an important role in human social interactions. However, posed expressions of emotion are not always the same as genuine feelings. Recent research has found that facial expressions are increasingly used as a tool for understanding social interactions instead of personal emotions. Therefore, the credibility assessment of facial expressions, namely, the discrimination of genuine (spontaneous) expressions from posed (deliberate/volitional/deceptive) ones, is a crucial yet challenging task in facial expression understanding. With recent advances in computer vision and machine learning techniques, rapid progress has been made in recent years for automatic detection of genuine and posed facial expressions. This paper presents a general review of the relevant research, including several spontaneous vs. posed (SVP) facial expression databases and various computer vision based detection methods. In addition, a variety of factors that will influence the performance of SVP detection methods are discussed along with open issues and technical challenges in this nascent field.

This paper presents a problem of observer-based adaptive fuzzy predefined performance control of a class of nonlinear pure-feedback systems with input delay and unknown control direction. Compared with the existing research, a novel predefined performance controller is proposed, which relaxes the assumption that the initial error is known. In addition, it is difficult to design the controllers due to input delay and nonaffine properties of the pure-feedback systems, which can be simplified by Pade approximation. Moreover, dynamic surface control and Nussbaum functions are applied to overcome the calculation explosion caused by repeated differentiations and unknown control direction, respectively. Based on the above methods, an adaptive fuzzy predefined performance controller is proposed, and it is proved that all the signals of a closed-loop system are semiglobally uniformly ultimately bounded. The tracking errors converge within a predefined range, while the observer estimation errors converge within a small zero region. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control system.

Ci confusion is the word of the process of writing and appreciation, the face of "Beauty and Love" and "Yan Zhi and a vehicle" is a tension between these two extremes. Aesthetic qualities of the words in the body of the study, if we ignore one of them once the pole, then it is difficult to accurately recognize this trait; But it is only when we take into account the polarization of the case, this character was able to be recognized . The dilemma in the theory of CI-poem is a kind tension between describing beauty and love and pressing moral ideas in writing and appreciating CI-poem. In the study for the aesthetic characteristics of CI-poem, once neglecting either of them, hardly can we recognize exactly such characteristics. Only paying attention to both of them can we grasp it

BackgroundThe brain death standard allowing a declaration of death based on neurological criteria is legally endorsed and routinely practiced in the West but not in Asia. In China, attempts to legalize the brain death standard have occurred several times without success. Cultural, religious, and philosophical factors have been proposed to explain this difference, but there is a lack of empirical studies to support this hypothesis.Methods476 medical providers from three academic hospitals in Hunan, China, completed a selfadministered survey including a 12-question brain death clinical knowledge assessment and hypothetical vignettes describing brain dead patients.ResultsThe response rate was 95.2 %. Almost all of the providers had heard of the term “brain death.” More than half have encountered presumed brain dead patients. Two-thirds accepted brain death as an ethical standard to determine human death. The mean knowledge score was 8.50 ± 1.83 out of 12. When given the description of a brain dead patient, 50.7 % considered the patient dead, 51.9 % would withdraw life support, and 40.6 % would allow organ procurement. Both provider and patient characteristics contributed to the providers’ decisions. Ethical acceptance was the most important independent predictor for brain death acknowledgement, followed by high knowledge scores, and the belief that the soul lives in the brain. Religious faith and associated beliefs did not have a significant effect.ConclusionsNotwithstanding scarce official accounts, recognition of the brain death standard is not uncommon in China. Chinese medical providers can adequately define the medical characteristics of brain death and accept it in theory, but hesitate to apply it to practice in the vignettes. Legalization is paramount in providing the protection providers need to comfortably declare brain death. However the medical decision-making surrounding brain death is complex and the provider's past experiences and emotions may also influence the process

Multiple goals balancing is an important but not yet fully validated dimension of complex problem solving (CPS). The present study used process data to explore how solvers clarify goals, set priorities, and balance conflicting goals. We extracted behavioral indicators of goal pursuit from the log data of 3,201 students on the third subtask of the “Ticket” task in the PISA 2012 CPS test. Cluster analysis was used to identify 10 groups that varied in goal pursuit behavior. Logistics and least-squares regression analysis were used to explore how goal pursuit affected task scores and CPS proficiency. The results showed that competent solvers clarified goals and weighed priorities more effectively. They also made trade-offs between conflicting goals. The importance of theoretically-driven log data analysis and coping strategies in the face of multiple goals conflict scenarios was discussed.