Search results for: Chinese character

Authors: Wanghongshu Zhou

Abstract:

This study aims to explore the relationship between the second language motivational self-system (L2MSS) and the willingness to communicate (WTC) among Chinese non-English major students in order to provide pedagogical implications for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms in Chinese universities. By employing a mixed methods approach, we involved 103 Chinese non-English major students from a typical university in China, conducted questionnaire survey to measure their levels of L2WTC and L2MSS level, and then analyzed the correlation between the two above mentioned variables. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight participants to provide a deeper understanding and explanation of the questionnaire data. Findings show that 1) Chinese non-English major students’ ideal L2 self and L2 learning experience could positively predict their L2 WTC in EFL class; 2) Chinese non-English major students’ ought-to L2 self might have no significant impact on their L2 WTC in EFL class; and 3) self-confidence might be another main factor that will influence Chinese non-English major students’ L2 WTC in EFL class. These findings might shed light on the second language acquisition field and provide pedagogical recommendations for pre-service as well as in-service EFL teachers.

Keywords: Chinese non-English major students, L2 Motivation, L2 willingness to communicate, self-confidence.

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Authors: Na Xiao

Abstract:

Animal metaphors have many different connotations, ranging from loving emotions to derogatory epithets, but gender expressions using animal metaphors are often imbalanced. Generally, animal metaphors related to females tend to be negative. Little known about the reasons for the negative expressions of animal female metaphors in Chinese contexts still have not been quantified. The study was based on the conceptual metaphor theory, and it used the Modern Chinese Corpus at the Center for Chinese Linguistics at Peking University (CCL Corpus) as a database, which identified the influencing variables of gender differences in the description of animal metaphors mapping humans in the Chinese context by observing the percentage of "tiger" metaphor. This study has proved that the tiger metaphors associated with humans in the Chinese context tend to be negative. Importantly, this study has also shown that the proportion of tiger metaphorical idioms that are related to women is very high. This finding can be used as crucial information for future studies on other gender-related animal metaphorical idioms and can offer additional insights for understanding trends in other animal metaphors.

Keywords: Chinese, CCL Corpus, gender differences, metaphorical idioms, tigers.

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Authors: Chak Kwong Lau

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Many buildings in Hong Kong are graced with enchanting works of Chinese calligraphy. An excellent example is Tao Fong Shan Christian Center founded by a Norwegian missionary, Karl Ludvig Reichelt (1877-1952) in 1930. Adorned with many inspiring works of Chinese calligraphy, the center functions as a place for the study of Christianity where people of different religions can meet to have religious discussions and intellectual exchanges. This paper examines the pivotal role played by Chinese calligraphy in creating a significant context for the center to fulfill her visions and missions. The methodology of this research involves stylistic and textual analyses of works of calligraphy, in particular through an examination and interpretation of their extended meanings in terms of architectural symbology and social and cultural contexts. Findings showed that Chinese calligraphy was effectively used as a powerful vehicle for a purposeful development of contextual Christian spirituality in Hong Kong.

Keywords: Chinese calligraphy, Hong Kong architecture, Hong Kong calligraphy, Johannes Prip-Møller, Karl Ludvig Reichelt, Norwegian missionary, Tao Fong Shan Christian Center, traditional Chinese architecture, contextual Christian spirituality, Chinese arts and culture.

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Authors: Zhe Ginnie Wang

Abstract:

With the unprecedented spread of cultural Chinese fashion design in the global fashion system, the under-identified ‘Guochao’ aesthetic that has emerged in the global market needs to be academically emphasized with a methodological approach looking at the Western-Eastern cultural hybridization present in fashion visualization. Through an in-depth and comprehensive investigation of a representative international-based Chinese designer, Angel Chen’s fashion show ‘Madam Qing’, this paper provides a methodological approach on how a form of traditional culture can be effectively extracted and applied to modern design using the most effective techniques. The central approach examined in this study involves creating aesthetic revolutions by addressing Chinese cultural identity through re-creating and modernizing traditional Chinese culture in design.

Keywords: Style modernization, design identity, fashion show, Guochao, Chinese culture, Angel Chen.

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Authors: Hamid Reza Boveiri

Abstract:

In this paper, a new proposed system for Persian printed numeral characters recognition with emphasis on representation and recognition stages is introduced. For the first time, in Persian optical character recognition, geometrical central moments as character image descriptor and fuzzy min-max neural network for Persian numeral character recognition has been used. Set of different experiments on binary images of regular, translated, rotated and scaled Persian numeral characters has been done and variety of results has been presented. The best result was 99.16% correct recognition demonstrating geometrical central moments and fuzzy min-max neural network are adequate for Persian printed numeral character recognition.

Keywords: Fuzzy min-max neural network, geometrical centralmoments, optical character recognition, Persian digits recognition, Persian printed numeral characters recognition.

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Authors: Anastasia Rita Widiarti, Phalita Nari Wastu

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Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is a stochastic method which has been used in various signal processing and character recognition. This study proposes to use HMM to recognize Javanese characters from a number of different handwritings, whereby HMM is used to optimize the number of state and feature extraction. An 85.7 % accuracy is obtained as the best result in 16-stated vertical model using pure HMM. This initial result is satisfactory for prompting further research.

Keywords: Character recognition, off-line handwritingrecognition, Hidden Markov Model.

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Authors: Z. Shaaban

Abstract:

This paper presents a new approach to tackle the problem of recognizing machine-printed Arabic texts. Because of the difficulty of recognizing cursive Arabic words, the text has to be normalized and segmented to be ready for the recognition stage. The new scheme for recognizing Arabic characters depends on multiple parallel neural networks classifier. The classifier has two phases. The first phase categories the input character into one of eight groups. The second phase classifies the character into one of the Arabic character classes in the group. The system achieved high recognition rate.

Keywords: Neural Networks, character recognition, feature extraction, multiple networks, Arabic text.

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Authors: Muhammad Faisal Zafar, Dzulkifli Mohamad, Razib M. Othman

Abstract:

On-line handwritten scripts are usually dealt with pen tip traces from pen-down to pen-up positions. Time evaluation of the pen coordinates is also considered along with trajectory information. However, the data obtained needs a lot of preprocessing including filtering, smoothing, slant removing and size normalization before recognition process. Instead of doing such lengthy preprocessing, this paper presents a simple approach to extract the useful character information. This work evaluates the use of the counter- propagation neural network (CPN) and presents feature extraction mechanism in full detail to work with on-line handwriting recognition. The obtained recognition rates were 60% to 94% using the CPN for different sets of character samples. This paper also describes a performance study in which a recognition mechanism with multiple thresholds is evaluated for counter-propagation architecture. The results indicate that the application of multiple thresholds has significant effect on recognition mechanism. The method is applicable for off-line character recognition as well. The technique is tested for upper-case English alphabets for a number of different styles from different peoples.

Keywords: On-line character recognition, character digitization, counter-propagation neural networks, extreme coordinates.

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Authors: Tainchi Lu, Chochih Lin

Abstract:

With a rapid growth in 3D graphics technology over the last few years, people are desired to see more flexible reacting motions of a biped in animations. In particular, it is impossible to anticipate all reacting motions of a biped while facing a perturbation. In this paper, we propose a three-level tracking method for animating a 3D humanoid character. First, we take the laws of physics into account to attach physical attributes, such as mass, gravity, friction, collision, contact, and torque, to bones and joints of a character. The next step is to employ PD controller to follow a reference motion as closely as possible. Once the character cannot tolerate a strong perturbation to prevent itself from falling down, we are capable of tracking a desirable falling-down action to avoid any falling condition inaccuracy. From the experimental results, we demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed method in comparison with conventional data-driven approaches.

Keywords: Character Animation, Forward Dynamics, Motion Tracking, PD Control.

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Authors: Velappa Ganapathy, Kok Leong Liew

Abstract:

Advancement in Artificial Intelligence has lead to the developments of various “smart" devices. Character recognition device is one of such smart devices that acquire partial human intelligence with the ability to capture and recognize various characters in different languages. Firstly multiscale neural training with modifications in the input training vectors is adopted in this paper to acquire its advantage in training higher resolution character images. Secondly selective thresholding using minimum distance technique is proposed to be used to increase the level of accuracy of character recognition. A simulator program (a GUI) is designed in such a way that the characters can be located on any spot on the blank paper in which the characters are written. The results show that such methods with moderate level of training epochs can produce accuracies of at least 85% and more for handwritten upper case English characters and numerals.

Keywords: Character recognition, multiscale, backpropagation, neural network, minimum distance technique.

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Authors: Wei Zhang, Lifen Zhao

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The present study aims to translate and validate the Career Motivation Scale among Chinese University and vocational college teachers. Exploratory factor analysis supported a three-factor structure that was consistent with the original structure of career motivation: career insight, career identity, and career resilience. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that a second-order three-factor model with correlated measurement errors best fit the data. Configural, metric, and scalar invariance models were tested, demonstrating that the Chinese version of the Career Motivation Scale did not differ across groups of school type, educational level, and working years in current institutions. The concurrent validity of the Chinese Career Motivation Scale was confirmed by its significant correlations with work engagement, career adaptability, career satisfaction, job crafting, and intention to quit. The results of the study indicated that the Chinese Career Motivation Scale was a valid and reliable measure of career motivation among university and vocational college teachers in China.

Keywords: Career motivation scale, Chinese university and vocational college teachers, measurement invariance, validation.

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Authors: Weitao Lin

Abstract:

To quickly extract adequate information from large-scale unstructured text data, this paper studies the representation of events in Chinese scenarios and performs the regularized abstraction. It proposes a Chinese event detection technique based on dependency parsing and rule matching. The method first performs dependency parsing on the original utterance, then performs pattern matching at the word or phrase granularity based on the results of dependent syntactic analysis, filters out the utterances with prominent non-event characteristics, and obtains the final results. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the method.

Keywords: Natural Language Processing, Chinese event detection, rules matching, dependency parsing.

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Authors: Lee Bih Ni, Kiu Su Na

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This paper discusses the Chinese Language Teaching as a Second Language by focusing on Immersion Teaching. Researchers used narrative literature review to describe the current states of both art and science in focused areas of inquiry. Immersion teaching comes with a standard that teachers must reliably meet. Chinese language-immersion instruction consists of language and content lessons, including functional usage of the language, academic language, authentic language, and correct Chinese sociocultural language. Researchers used narrative literature reviews to build a scientific knowledge base. Researchers collected all the important points of discussion, and put them here with reference to the specific field where this paper is originally based on. The findings show that Chinese Language in immersion teaching is not like standard foreign language classroom; immersion setting provides more opportunities to teach students colloquial language than academic. Immersion techniques also introduce a language’s cultural and social contexts in a meaningful and memorable way. It is particularly important that immersion teachers connect classwork with real-life experiences. Immersion also includes more elements of discovery and inquiry based learning than do other kinds of instructional practices. Students are always and consistently interpreted the conclusions and context clues.

Keywords: A second language, Chinese language teaching, immersion teaching, instructional strategies.

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Authors: Kandarpa Kumar Sarma

Abstract:

The key to the continued success of ANN depends, considerably, on the use of hybrid structures implemented on cooperative frame-works. Hybrid architectures provide the ability to the ANN to validate heterogeneous learning paradigms. This work describes the implementation of a set of Distributed and Hybrid ANN models for Character Recognition applied to Anglo-Assamese scripts. The objective is to describe the effectiveness of Hybrid ANN setups as innovative means of neural learning for an application like multilingual handwritten character and numeral recognition.

Keywords: Assamese, Feature, Recurrent.

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Authors: Shwu-Huey Wang, Hsiu-Yuan Wang

Abstract:

Tourists- eyes will often be attracted by the unique phenomenon of the roadsides: betel nut beauties (pronounced as binlang xishi in Mandarin), if they drive on the roads of Taiwan. Sitting in the neon-lit glass stalls with attractive dress on the roadsides, betel nut beauties usually sell betel nuts to the passing truckers or car drivers with much of their efforts. Moreover, in order to attract peoples- eyesight and increase the sales volume, the young girls are in skimpy clothing to promote betel nuts or beverages to their customers. Therefore, when the Chinese tourists come to Taiwan, to see the unique betel nut beauty phenomenon has become one of their greatly interested things or even a “must see". This paper describes betel but beauties in Taiwan, explained why the Chinese tourists like to see them in Taiwan and proposed propositions for examination.

Keywords: Betel nut, betel nut beauty, Chinese tourists, tourism.

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Authors: Triyanto

Abstract:

The purposes of the paper are to know and improve the legal awareness of Surakarta local government officer to Law No.12/2006 on Citizenship in vanishing civic discrimination to Chinese Indonesians. Some issues of the Chinese Indonesian are the definitions of Indonesian citizens and native Indonesian people or “warga negara Indonesia (WNI) asli" and their obligation to show Indonesian Citizenship Certificate (SBKRI) in processing civil documents. Legal awareness of Surakarta local government officer can be categorized as “legal knowledge" only. They know the laws but they do not implement it yet. Nevertheless, at least this research has given the new awareness in citizenship law for the officers.

Keywords: Legal Awareness, Government Officer, Civic Discrimination, Chinese Indonesians

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Authors: F. P., Chew, M. H., Teong, Z. Ishak

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School homework has been synonymous with students- life in Chinese national type primary schools in Malaysia. Although many reports in the press claimed that students were burdened with too much of it, homework continues to be a common practice in national type schools that is believed to contribute to academic achievement. This study is conducted to identify the relationship between the burden of school homework and academic achievement among pupils in Chinese National Type Primary School in the state of Perak, Malaysia. A total of 284 students (142 from urban and 142 from rural) respectively were chosen as participants in this study. Variables of gender and location (urban/rural areas) has shown significant difference in student academic achievement. Female Chinese student from rural areas showed a higher mean score than males from urban area. Therefore, the Chinese language teachers should give appropriate and relevant homework to primary school students to achieve good academic performance.

Keywords: homework, academic achievement, Chinese National Type Primary Schools

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Authors: Wei Yan, Wei Dong

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Facing the understanding problem of update and preservation of urban history space under background of rapid Chinese urbanization, so at first there is a need to dig the philosophic principles of “antithesis” and “unification” which are contained in the traditional Chinese literature known as “antithesis” and do the job of planning translation by personal understanding in order to form understanding and value systems of dialectical urban history space under the foundation of “antithesis”. Then we could put forward a “context” concept for urban history space under the foregoing basis. After that, we will take the update and preservation of Ningbo Tianyi Pavilion’s historical district as an example to discuss problems related to understanding of urban history area under the basis of Chinese tradition culture, improvement of value system, construction of urban trait space and Chinese “localization” of planning theory.

Keywords: Antithesis, traditional values, City renewal and conservation, the “context” of city history space.

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Authors: Xinyu Zhang, Olga Torres-Hostench

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This article presents a comparative study evaluating and comparing the quality of machine translation (MT) output of Chinese gastronomy nomenclature. Chinese gastronomic culture is experiencing an increased international acknowledgment nowadays. The nomenclature of Chinese gastronomy not only reflects a specific aspect of culture, but it is related to other areas of society such as philosophy, traditional medicine, etc. Chinese dish names are composed of several types of cultural references, such as ingredients, colors, flavors, culinary techniques, cooking utensils, toponyms, anthroponyms, metaphors, historical tales, among others. These cultural references act as one of the biggest difficulties in translation, in which the use of translation techniques is usually required. Regarding the lack of Chinese food-related translation studies, especially in Chinese-Spanish translation, and the current massive use of MT, the quality of the MT output of Chinese dish names is questioned. Fifty Chinese dish names with different types of cultural components were selected in order to complete this study. First, all of these dish names were translated by three different MT tools (Google Translate, Baidu Translate and Bing Translator). Second, a questionnaire was designed and completed by 12 Chinese online users (Chinese graduates of a Hispanic Philology major) in order to find out user preferences regarding the collected MT output. Finally, human translation techniques were observed and analyzed to identify what translation techniques would be observed more often in the preferred MT proposals. The result reveals that the MT output of the Chinese gastronomy nomenclature is not of high quality. It would be recommended not to trust the MT in occasions like restaurant menus, TV culinary shows, etc. However, the MT output could be used as an aid for tourists to have a general idea of a dish (the main ingredients, for example). Literal translation turned out to be the most observed technique, followed by borrowing, generalization and adaptation, while amplification, particularization and transposition were infrequently observed. Possibly because that the MT engines at present are limited to relate equivalent terms and offer literal translations without taking into account the whole context meaning of the dish name, which is essential to the application of those less observed techniques. This could give insight into the post-editing of the Chinese dish name translation. By observing and analyzing translation techniques in the proposals of the machine translators, the post-editors could better decide which techniques to apply in each case so as to correct mistakes and improve the quality of the translation.

Keywords: Chinese dish names, cultural references, machine translation, translation techniques.

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Authors: Xiaowen Zhang, Wanda Luen-Wun Siu

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Against the background of President Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin hailing economics at the heart of their bilateral relationship, Putin conveyed that economic cooperation and trade are important to the revitalization of China and Russia. Likewise, President Xi Jinping noted that Russia and China bask in unprecedented great confidence and collaboration. Such amicable relationships may translate into enhanced economic cooperation and Chinese foreign investment in Russia. This paper employed a retrospective review and attempted to analyze Chinese agricultural engagement in Russian Far East, in addition to examining what was dubbed as land grabbing in Russia, probing into the political, economics, and human dimensions on the land debate. Such an analysis is significant as it contributes to the literature on foreign investment in agriculture.

Keywords: Agriculture, Chinese foreign investment, land grabbing, Russian Far East.

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Authors: Ying Wang

Abstract:

Service trade is an important force of influencing economic development. A review on the related literatures is done firstly. Then through the construction of a Diamond Model, the main factors which influence the competitiveness of Chinese service trade are determined. With three competitiveness indexes served as the reference series respectively, the influencing factors served as the comparable series, three grey incidence models are then built up to conduct an empirical analysis on the main factors influencing the competitiveness of service trade after China entering WTO. The result indicates that urbanization level, open degree of service industry and foreign direct investment have larger impacts on Chinese service trade competitiveness, followed in turn by GDP in service industry and human capital, while commodity trade has the minimum impact. Further discussion provides train of thought for the upgrade of Chinese service trade competitiveness.

Keywords: Service Trade, Competitiveness, Diamond Model, Grey Incidence Model.

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Authors: Y. R. Li, Y. Y. Wang

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After allowing direct flights from Mainland China to Taiwan, Chinese tourists increased according to Tourism Bureaustatistics. There are from 0.19 to 2 million tourists from 2008 to 2011. Mainland China has become the main source of Taiwan developing tourism industry. Taiwanese government should know more about comments from Chinese tourists to Taiwan in order toproperly market Taiwan tourism and enhance the overall quality of tourism. In order to understand Chinese visitors’ comments, this study adopts content analysis to analyze electronic word-of-mouth on Web. This study collects 375 blog articles of Chinese tourists from Ctrip.com as a database during 2009 to 2011. Through the qualitative data analysis the traveling destination imagesis divided into seven dimensions, such as senic spots, shopping, food and beverages, accommodations, transportation, festivals and recreation activities. Finally, this study proposes some practical managerial implication to know both positive and negative images of the seven dimensions from Chinese tourists, providing marketing strategies and suggestions to traveling agency industry.

Keywords: Destination Image, Content Analysis, Electronic Word-of-Mouth.

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Authors: Abigail Qian Zhou

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In today's China, the well-educated middle class, with stable jobs and above-average income, are the driving force behind its Internet society. Through the analysis of data from the 2015 Chinese General Social Survey and 50 interviewees, this study investigates the current situation of this group’s specific internet usage. The findings of this study demonstrate that daily life among the members of this socioeconomic group is closely tied to the Internet. For Chinese middle class, the Internet is used to socialize and entertain self and others. It is also used to search for and share information as well as to build their identities. The empirical results of this study will provide a reference, supported by factual data, for enterprises seeking to target the Chinese middle class through online marketing efforts.

Keywords: China, internet use, middle class, network behavior, online marketing.

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Authors: Yongsheng Guo, Mirza Muhammad Naseer, Xiaoxian Zhu

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This study explores the perceptions and conducts of Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa from ethical and cultural perspectives. It offers a better understanding of how ethical and cultural factors affect Chinese investment in Africa and how the investment projects performed in Africa from both Chinese investors and African stakeholders’ perceptions. It adopted a grounded theory approach and conducted 30 in-depth interviews with corporate managers. Grounded theory models are developed to link the ethical and cultural factors, actions, and consequences. Results reveal that some ethical concepts like the unity of humans and nature, benevolence, virtue and responsibility, and cultural traits including propriety, righteousness, sincerity, equilibrium, long-term orientation, and principles affect Chinese investors when making investments in Africa. Most Chinese investors harmonize with local managers, cooperate with each other, and are gentle and courteous to partners. They take stable and steady actions and invest in infrastructure and agriculture projects and adopt a virtue governance system in the organization. This study finds that consequently, Chinese investors and local partners take complementary advantages, make achievements sequentially, and therefore both sides can win. They recognize great potentials and make sustainable development in Africa to achieve the Great Together in the future. This study proposes a Chinese ethics and governance system including economic, social, and political perspectives and compares it with alternative systems. It makes implications to the world island theory and propose suggestions to solve the Clash of Civilizations problem.

Keywords: Foreign Direct Investment, Ethics, National Culture, China, Africa.

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Authors: Nan Li, Ying Wang

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Using entropy weight and TOPSIS method, a comprehensive evaluation is done on the development level of Chinese regional service industry in this paper. Firstly, based on existing research results, an evaluation index system is constructed from the scale of development, the industrial structure and the economic benefits. An evaluation model is then built up based on entropy weight and TOPSIS, and an empirical analysis is conducted on the development level of service industries in 31 Chinese provinces during 2006 and 2009 from the two dimensions or time series and cross section, which provides new idea for assessing regional service industry. Furthermore, the 31 provinces are classified into four categories based on the evaluation results, and deep analysis is carried out on the evaluation results.

Keywords: Chinese regional service industry, Development level, Entropy weight, TOPSIS Evaluation Method

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Authors: Hazem M. El-Bakry

Abstract:

Neural processors have shown good results for detecting a certain character in a given input matrix. In this paper, a new idead to speed up the operation of neural processors for character detection is presented. Such processors are designed based on cross correlation in the frequency domain between the input matrix and the weights of neural networks. This approach is developed to reduce the computation steps required by these faster neural networks for the searching process. The principle of divide and conquer strategy is applied through image decomposition. Each image is divided into small in size sub-images and then each one is tested separately by using a single faster neural processor. Furthermore, faster character detection is obtained by using parallel processing techniques to test the resulting sub-images at the same time using the same number of faster neural networks. In contrast to using only faster neural processors, the speed up ratio is increased with the size of the input image when using faster neural processors and image decomposition. Moreover, the problem of local subimage normalization in the frequency domain is solved. The effect of image normalization on the speed up ratio of character detection is discussed. Simulation results show that local subimage normalization through weight normalization is faster than subimage normalization in the spatial domain. The overall speed up ratio of the detection process is increased as the normalization of weights is done off line.

Keywords: Fast Character Detection, Neural Processors, Cross Correlation, Image Normalization, Parallel Processing.

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Authors: Harshit Mehrotra, Gaurav Agrawal, M.C. Srivastava

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Computerized lip reading has been one of the most actively researched areas of computer vision in recent past because of its crime fighting potential and invariance to acoustic environment. However, several factors like fast speech, bad pronunciation, poor illumination, movement of face, moustaches and beards make lip reading difficult. In present work, we propose a solution for automatic lip contour tracking and recognizing letters of English language spoken by speakers using the information available from lip movements. Level set method is used for tracking lip contour using a contour velocity model and a feature vector of lip movements is then obtained. Character recognition is performed using modified k nearest neighbor algorithm which assigns more weight to nearer neighbors. The proposed system has been found to have accuracy of 73.3% for character recognition with speaker lip movements as the only input and without using any speech recognition system in parallel. The approach used in this work is found to significantly solve the purpose of lip reading when size of database is small.

Keywords: Contour Velocity Model, Lip Contour Tracking, LipReading, Visual Character Recognition.

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Authors: Jinghao Sun, Guozhen Tan, Guangjian Hou

Abstract:

The Chinese Postman Problem (CPP) is one of the classical problems in graph theory and is applicable in a wide range of fields. With the rapid development of hybrid systems and model based testing, Chinese Postman Problem with Time Dependent Travel Times (CPPTDT) becomes more realistic than the classical problems. In the literature, we have proposed the first integer programming formulation for the CPPTDT problem, namely, circuit formulation, based on which some polyhedral results are investigated and a cutting plane algorithm is also designed. However, there exists a main drawback: the circuit formulation is only available for solving the special instances with all circuits passing through the origin. Therefore, this paper proposes a new integer programming formulation for solving all the general instances of CPPTDT. Moreover, the size of the circuit formulation is too large, which is reduced dramatically here. Thus, it is possible to design more efficient algorithm for solving the CPPTDT in the future research.

Keywords: Chinese Postman Problem, Time Dependent, Integer Programming, Upper Bound Analysis.

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Authors: Christiana Gauci-Sciberras

Abstract:

The first language (L1) could be used in foreign language teaching and learning as a pedagogical tool to scaffold new knowledge in the target language (TL) upon linguistic knowledge that the learner already has. In a bilingual context, code-switching between the two languages usually occurs in classrooms. One of the reasons for code-switching is because both languages are used for scaffolding new knowledge. This research paper aims to find out why both the L1 (Maltese) and the L2 (English) are used in the classroom of Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) in the bilingual context of Malta. This research paper also aims to find out the learners’ perceptions of the use of a bilingual medium of instruction. Two research methods were used to collect qualitative data; semi-structured interviews with adult learners of Mandarin Chinese and lesson observations. These two research methods were used so that the data collected in the interviews would be triangulated with data collected in lesson observations. The L1 (Maltese) is the language of instruction mostly used. The teacher and the learners switch to the L2 (English) or to any other foreign language according to the need at a particular instance during the lesson.

Keywords: Chinese, bilingual, pedagogical purpose of L1 and L2, CFL acquisition.

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Authors: M. K. Jindal, G. S. Lehal, R. K. Sharma

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Character segmentation is an important preprocessing step for text recognition. In degraded documents, existence of touching characters decreases recognition rate drastically, for any optical character recognition (OCR) system. In this paper a study of touching Gurmukhi characters is carried out and these characters have been divided into various categories after a careful analysis.Structural properties of the Gurmukhi characters are used for defining the categories. New algorithms have been proposed to segment the touching characters in middle zone. These algorithms have shown a reasonable improvement in segmenting the touching characters in degraded Gurmukhi script. The algorithms proposed in this paper are applicable only to machine printed text.

Keywords: Character Segmentation, Middle Zone, Touching Characters.

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