Learning shape and texture progression for young child face aging

Face aging (FA) for young faces refers to rendering the aging faces at target age for an individual, generally under 20s, which is an important topic of facial age analysis. Unlike traditional FA for adults, it is challenging to age children with one deep learning-based FA network, since there are deformations of facial shapes and variations of textural details. To alleviate the deficiency, a unified FA framework for young faces is proposed, which consists of two decoupled networks to apply aging image translation. It explicitly models transformations of geometry and appearance using two components: GD-GAN, which simulates the Geometric Deformation using Generative Adversarial Network; TV-GAN, which simulates the Textural Variations guided by the age-related saliency map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method has advantages over the state-of-the-art methods in terms of synthesizing visually plausible images for young faces, as well as preserving the personalized features.     

机器翻译译文质量估计综述

机器翻译译文质量估计(Quality Estimation,QE)是指在不需要人工参考译文的条件下,估计机器翻译系统产生的译文的质量,对机器翻译研究和应用具有很重要的价值。机器翻译译文质量估计经过最近几年的发展,取得了丰富的研究成果。该文首先介绍了机器翻译译文质量估计的背景与意义;然后详细介绍了句子级QE、单词级QE、文档级QE的具体任务目标、评价指标等内容,进一步概括了QE方法发展的三个阶段: 基于特征工程和机器学习的QE方法阶段,基于深度学习的QE方法阶段,融入预训练模型的QE方法阶段,并介绍了每一阶段中的代表性研究工作;最后分析了目前的研究现状及不足,并对未来QE方法的研究及发展方向进行了展望。     

Structural Cues for Understanding eEF1A2 Moonlighting

Spontaneous mutations in the EEF1A2 gene cause epilepsy and severe neurological disabilities in children. The crystal structure of eEF1A2 protein purified from rabbit skeletal muscle reveals a post-translationally modified dimer that provides information about the sites of interaction with numerous binding partners, including itself, and maps these mutations onto the dimer and tetramer interfaces. The spatial locations of the side chain carboxylates of Glu301 and Glu374, to which phosphatidylethanolamine is uniquely attached via an amide bond, define the anchoring points of eEF1A2 to cellular membranes and interorganellar membrane contact sites. Additional bioinformatic and molecular modeling results provide novel structural insight into the demonstrated binding of eEF1A2 to SH3 domains, the common MAPK docking groove, filamentous actin, and phosphatidylinositol-4 kinase IIIβ. In this new light, the role of eEF1A2 as an ancient, multifaceted, and articulated G protein at the crossroads of autophagy, oncogenesis and viral replication appears very distant from the “canonical” one of delivering aminoacyl-tRNAs to the ribosome that has dominated the scene and much of the thinking for many decades.     

A Tradeoff Between Accuracy and Speed for K-Means Seed Determination

With a sharp increase in the information volume, analyzing and retrieving this vast data volume is much more essential than ever. One of the main techniques that would be beneficial in this regard is called the Clustering method. Clustering aims to classify objects so that all objects within a cluster have similar features while other objects in different clusters are as distinct as possible. One of the most widely used clustering algorithms with the well and approved performance in different applications is the k-means algorithm. The main problem of the k-means algorithm is its performance which can be directly affected by the selection in the primary clusters. Lack of attention to this crucial issue has consequences such as creating empty clusters and decreasing the convergence time. Besides, the selection of appropriate initial seeds can reduce the cluster’s inconsistency. In this paper, we present a new method to determine the initial seeds of the k-mean algorithm to improve the accuracy and decrease the number of iterations of the algorithm. For this purpose, a new method is proposed considering the average distance between objects to determine the initial seeds. Our method attempts to provide a proper tradeoff between the accuracy and speed of the clustering algorithm. The experimental results showed that our proposed approach outperforms the Chithra with 1.7% and 2.1% in terms of clustering accuracy for Wine and Abalone detection data, respectively. Furthermore, achieved results indicate that comparing with the Reverse Nearest Neighbor (RNN) search approach, the proposed method has a higher convergence speed.     

变分自编码器模型综述

变分自编码器（VAE）作为深度隐空间生成模型的一种，近年来其表现性能取得了极大的成功，尤其是在图像生成方面。变分自编码器模型作为无监督式特征学习的重要工具之一，可以通过学习隐编码空间与数据生成空间的特征映射，进而在输出端重构生成输入数据。梳理了传统变分自编码器模型及其衍生变体模型的发展与研究现状，并就此做了总结和对比，最后分析了变分自编码器模型存在的问题与挑战，并就可能的发展趋势做了展望。     

Learning a Deep Predictive Coding Network for a Semi-Supervised 3D-Hand Pose Estimation

In this paper we present a CNN based approach for a real time 3D-hand pose estimation from the depth sequence. Prior discriminative approaches have achieved remarkable success but are facing two main challenges: Firstly, the methods are fully supervised hence require large numbers of annotated training data to extract the dynamic information from a hand representation. Secondly, unreliable hand detectors based on strong assumptions or a weak detector which often fail in several situations like complex environment and multiple hands. In contrast to these methods, this paper presents an approach that can be considered as semi-supervised by performing predictive coding of image sequences of hand poses in order to capture latent features underlying a given image without supervision. The hand is modelled using a novel latent tree dependency model (LDTM) which transforms internal joint location to an explicit representation. Then the modeled hand topology is integrated with the pose estimator using data dependent method to jointly learn latent variables of the posterior pose appearance and the pose configuration respectively. Finally, an unsupervised error term which is a part of the recurrent architecture ensures smooth estimations of the final pose. Experiments on three challenging public datasets, ICVL, MSRA, and NYU demonstrate the significant performance of the proposed method which is comparable or better than state-of-the-art approaches.      

Arabic sign language intelligent translator

ABSTRACT

Arabic sign language (ArSL) is method of communication between deaf communities in Arab countries; therefore, the development of systemsthat can recognize the gestures provides a means for the Deaf to easily integrate into society. In this research we implemented a computational structurefor an intelligent interpreter that automatically recognizes the isolated dynamic gestures. The proposed system recognizes and translates gesturesperformed with one or both hands. It comprises five subsystems, building dataset, video processing, feature extraction, mapping between ArSL and Arabictext, and text generation. To apply the system, 100-signs of ArSL was used, which was applied on 1500 video files. It's were divided into five classes:alphabet, numbers, "prepositions, pronouns and question words", Arabic life expressions, and "nouns and verbs". The evaluation indicated that thesystem automatically recognizes and translates isolated dynamic ArSL gestures by highly accurate manner. The results showed that the system accuracy is 95.8%.     

A Novel Beam Search to Improve Neural Machine Translation for English-Chinese

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an end-to-end learning approach for automated translation, overcoming the weaknesses of conventional phrase-based translation systems. Although NMT based systems have gained their popularity in commercial translation applications, there is still plenty of room for improvement. Being the most popular search algorithm in NMT, beam search is vital to the translation result. However, traditional beam search can produce duplicate or missing translation due to its target sequence selection strategy. Aiming to alleviate this problem, this paper proposed neural machine translation improvements based on a novel beam search evaluation function. And we use reinforcement learning to train a translation evaluation system to select better candidate words for generating translations. In the experiments, we conducted extensive experiments to evaluate our methods. CASIA corpus and the 1,000,000 pairs of bilingual corpora of NiuTrans are used in our experiments. The experiment results prove that the proposed methods can effectively improve the English to Chinese translation quality.     

汉英双语法庭口译员角色定位的伦理思考

关于汉英法庭口译员的角色定位,从译员的主体性意识角度出发,得出其在庭审过程中担任的有"信息的筛选人","交际的调解人","权力的平衡人"以及"立场的倾斜人"四种不同的角色,这四种角色的交织关系具化了在庭审过程中译员所展现出来的主体性意识。同时也不能回避其自身的伦理意识问题。以切斯特曼的五种翻译伦理模式为导向,结合相关真实庭审语料分析,对汉英双语法庭口译员的角色定位进行客观的伦理评价,得到如下发现:1)译员主体性意识下的汉英双语法庭口译员的四种角色符合翻译伦理要求;2)汉英双语法庭口译员的角色定位并不是一层不变的,只要符合翻译伦理要求,译员角色的定位可以有新的突破和发展。     

A proposed expert system for word sense disambiguation: deductive ambiguity resolution based on data mining and forward chaining

One of the major issues in the process of machine translation is the problem of choosing the proper translation for a multi‐sense word referred to as word sense disambiguation (WSD). Two commonly used approaches to this problem are statistical and example‐based methods. In statistical methods, ambiguity resolution is mostly carried out by making use of some statistics extracted from previously translated documents or dual corpora of source and target languages. Example‐based methods follow a similar approach as they also make use of bilingual corpora. However, they perform the task of matching at run‐time (i.e. online matching). In this paper, by looking at the WSD problem from a different viewpoint, we propose a system, which consists of two main parts. The first part includes a data mining algorithm, which runs offline and extracts some useful knowledge about the co‐occurrences of the words. In this algorithm, each sentence is imagined as a transaction in Market Basket Data Analysis problem, and the words included in a sentence play the role of purchased items. The second part of the system is an expert system whose knowledge base consists of the set of association rules generated by the first part. Moreover, in order to deduce the correct senses of the words, we introduce an efficient algorithm based on forward chaining in order to be used in the inference engine of the proposed expert system. The encouraging performance of the system in terms of precision and recall as well as its efficiency will be analysed and discussed through a set of experiments.