Adversarial Separation Network for Text Style Transfer

This article considers the task of text style transfer: transforming a specific style of sentence into another while preserving its style-independent content. A dominate approach to text style transfer is to learn a good content factor of text, define a fixed vector for every style and recombine them to generate text in the required style. In fact, there are a large number of different words to convey the same style from different aspects. Thus, using a fixed vector to represent one style is very inefficient, which causes the weak representation power of the style vector and limits text diversity of the same style. To address this problem, we propose a novel neural generative model called Adversarial Separation Network (ASN), which can learn the content and style vector jointly and the learnt vectors have strong representation power and good interpretabilities. In our method, adversarial learning is implemented to enhance our model’s capability of disentangling the two factors. To evaluate our method, we conduct experiments on two benchmark datasets. Experimental results show our method can perform style transfer better than strong comparison systems. We also demonstrate the strong interpretability of the learnt latent vectors.

Maximum Work Rate Extractable from Energy Fluxes

A general formalism is developed to evaluate the amount of work extractable from energy fluxes. It covers nonequilibrium cases when the concept of exergy is not relevant. The rate of work deficiency, which has been previously introduced as the total loss of exergy, is defined here as the total loss of work, which would have resulted if all the work were lost to the environment. New performance indicators are proposed. First, the work content factor gives the proportion of extractable work in a given amount of energy. Second, the work deficiency factor is a measure of the potential of improvement for the operation of energy conversion systems. Previous results reported in literature are particular cases of the general results obtained here. The formalism is used to evaluate the work rate extractable from the solar energy flux. Results are shown in cases where solar radiation interacts with materials without energy bandgap (metals) and with energy bandgaps (semiconductors), respectively.

Pragmalinguistic Features of Informative Documentary Texts in Military Discourse (Based on Documents of the Great Patriotic War)

This article describes genre-forming features of informative documentary texts of military discourse, such as communicative goal, author’s image, addressee’s image, event content, factor of the future, and factor of the past. The following terms are studied here: documentary text, speech genre, and informative speech genres. The documentary text is considered as a kind of а speech genre, realized in writing. In the course of the research, the most frequent informative documents of military discourse (Great Patriotic War period) were selected, i.e. summary, dispatch, and report. Having analysed the definitions of the abovementioned speech genres and the corresponding documentary texts, the author was able to determine their communicative goals, single out the main (inform) and additional (ask, suggest) genre-forming intentions. It was revealed that the speech addressee in informative speech genres can be both an executive officer and a group of persons, information about them (detailed or not) being presented in the initial and final formulas of the document. The author’s image in the main texts of documents is either implicit or manifested with the help of performative verbs. The speech addressee is abstract and is only indicated in the initial formula of the document, in most cases by the person’s position. Informative documents should meet the following requirements: impersonal and multi-event nature, presentation of the informative component by events of the past and the present, creation of a futural perspective in texts with incentive intentions. The analysis of the factor of the past showed that the summary and the analytical report are initiative genres of written communication, while the dispatch and the operations report are reactive speech genres. Having studied the factor of the future parameter, the author concluded that informative speech genres underlie other informative and directive genres. For instance, dispatches and reports are created on the basis of summaries, whose main intention is to inform. The texts of dispatches and reports, having additional intentions of asking and suggesting, form the basis for directive documentary texts.

ANALYSIS OF CAUSES OF SUBSIDENCE IN THE AREA NEAR UJUNGNEGORO STATION, BATANG REGENCY

Changes in human activities from time to time increase rapidly. This activity requires the support of a reliable transportation network. Railroad land transportation is the main choice to overcome the impasse of human mobility and distribution of goods. It is known that this type of transportation does not intersect with other means of transportation so that it is free from congestion. For the sake of smoothness and safety in the use of trains, proper maintenance of the rail network is needed. Land subsidence supporting the railroad tracks is a common event that disrupts the functioning of the railroad and is part of maintenance. One of the subsidence that often occurs on the railroad tracks is a subsidence on the railroad tracks around Ujungnegoro Station. To find out the cause, an analysis of geoelectric data, groundwater basin conditions and local topography has been carried out on it. The results of the analysis that have been carried out conclude that the clay content factor and the concentration of water flow are the main factors causing subsidence.

ANALISIS MOTIVASI PECINTA KULINER MAKANAN TRADISIONAL DI KOTA SEMARANG

Traditional food is food that is formed by a process of development that lasts for years, because of the fear of being abandoned by the younger generation, forgetting and refusing to consume traditional food which has existed before. So the purpose of this study is to determine the factors that influence the motivation of traditional food culinary lovers in Semarang City. The data analysis technique used is descriptive statistics and factor analysis using the SPSS 25 program. Based on the results of the research that has been done, the following conclusions can be drawn. The motivational factors for choosing food for traditional food culinary lovers in the city of Semarang by using 400 respondents can be drawn the following conclusions, namely, there are six determining factors that can be seen from the highest loading factor of each formed factor. These factors are natural ingredients factors, sensory attractiveness factors, price, mood factors, healthy food factors, and familiarity factors. The dominant factor of motivation for choosing food for traditional food culinary lovers is the natural content factor.

Content Factor to Promote Islamic Weblog Continuance Uses

Religious information is now being disseminated through various internet applications including weblogs. Providing digital Islamic Information content online via the internet is vulnerable. Its exposure to the modification of information was taken from the original information resources by irresponsible parties. This research paper is about examining the information content and relationship of each factor that encourages the peoples to continue to use the Islamic weblogs and able to recognize between the true and false on Islamic information teaching. Quantitative research method was applied for data collection and about 800 questionnaires have been distributed to Islamic religious subject teachers. Finding of the study revealed significant value for content factors such as Continuance Use, Satisfaction, Perceived Usefulness that promote continued use of Islamic web blog. Hypotheses analysis of the finding indicated only content factors like Reliability and Confirmation, Perceived Usefulness and Satisfaction, Confirmation and Satisfaction, Continuance Use and Satisfaction have supported each other for prediction continuances use of Islamic web blog.

Multimodal Unsupervised Speech Translation for Recognizing and Evaluating Second Language Speech

This paper addresses an automatic proficiency evaluation and speech recognition for second language (L2) speech. The proposed method recognizes the speech uttered by the L2 speaker, measures a variety of fluency scores, and evaluates the proficiency of the speaker’s spoken English. Stress and rhythm scores are one of the important factors used to evaluate fluency in spoken English and are computed by comparing the stress patterns and the rhythm distributions to those of native speakers. In order to compute the stress and rhythm scores even when the phonemic sequence of the L2 speaker’s English sentence is different from the native speaker’s one, we align the phonemic sequences based on a dynamic time-warping approach. We also improve the performance of the speech recognition system for non-native speakers and compute fluency features more accurately by augmenting the non-native training dataset and training an acoustic model with the augmented dataset. In this work, we augment the non-native speech by converting some speech signal characteristics (style) while preserving its linguistic information. The proposed variational autoencoder (VAE)-based speech conversion network trains the conversion model by decomposing the spectral features of the speech into a speaker-invariant content factor and a speaker-specific style factor to estimate diverse and robust speech styles. Experimental results show that the proposed method effectively measures the fluency scores and generates diverse output signals. Also, in the proficiency evaluation and speech recognition tests, the proposed method improves the proficiency score performance and speech recognition accuracy for all proficiency areas compared to a method employing conventional acoustic models.

Reexamining the Factorial Validity of the 16-Item Scale Measuring Need for Cognition

A growing body of studies has emphasized the need to consider method effects due to positively and negatively worded items for a better understanding of the factorial structure of psychological constructs. In particular, several researchers identified such method factors besides the content factor for various scales measuring Need for Cognition (NFC). However, regarding the factorial validity of the 16-item NFC scale developed by Bless, Wänke, Bohner, Fellhauer, and Schwartz (1994) , only a one-factor structure without the inclusion of possible method factors has been examined so far. Therefore, we considered such method factors in a broader reexamination of the factorial validity of this measure by investigating a range of structural models in two samples ( n = 830, n = 500). We found that a one-factor solution as proposed by Bertrams and Dickhäuser (2010) and Bless et al. (1994) did not fit the data, whereas the inclusion of method factors improved the model fit significantly. According to our results, the model including both the content factor and two uncorrelated method factors yielded the best model fit. In sum, our results provide an extended view of the factorial validity of the 16-item scale of NFC.