Converse Question Research Articles

A Comparative Analysis on the Listening Test of HSK and IELTS

To promote the improvement of the HSK, this study compares the listening tests of HSK Levels 4 to 6 with the IELTS Academic in terms of question setting, speech input, and discourse. The findings revealed that the listening test of HSK has unbalanced question structure, limited question types and lacks authenticity in speech. Significant improvements are needed in the reliability, validity and authenticity of the test. To solve these problems, this study refers to the mature experience of IELTS and proposes that HSK should balance the ratio of monologue to conversation questions, increase the question types, adjust the speed of speech, standardize the listening lexicon, and broaden the topic genres.

Patient-authored medical record II: A not-knowing approach to psychiatric nursing

A patient-authored medical record (PAMR) is a narrative-based prescription that is written by a psychiatric patient with help from a nurse. It is a tool specifically designed and developed for psychiatric nursing. We have reported its notable therapeutic effects for Japanese patients and found that the patients had accurate views of how to improve their illness. The present paper, which broadens the scope of this examination, includes the entire process of using this tool, including both patient-authored medical records and follow-up dialogue. We aim to demonstrate how a patient's potentials are leveraged and expanded through the interpretation of such texts through dialogue, in which interpretation takes the form of a conversational question based on not-knowing. Follow-up meetings facilitate the therapeutic process and team collaboration for patients, medical staff, and families. We also reaffirm the soundness and legitimacy of psychiatric patients writing their own prescription with help from a nurse.

Highly Non-contractive Iterated Function Systems on Euclidean Space Can Have an Attractor

AbstractIterated function systems (IFSs) and their attractors have been central to the theory of fractal geometry almost from its inception. Moreover, contractivity of the functions in the IFS has been central to the theory of iterated functions systems. If the functions in the IFS are contractions, then the IFS is guaranteed to have a unique attractor. The converse question, does the existence of an attractor imply that the IFS is contractive, originates in a 1959 work by Bessaga which proves a converse to the contraction mapping theorem. Although a converse is true in that case, it is known that it does not always hold for an IFS. In general, there do exist IFSs with attractors and which are not contractive. However, in the context of IFSs in Euclidean space, this question has been open. In this paper we show that a highly non-contractive iterated function system in Euclidean space can have an attractor. In order to do that, we introduce the concept of an L-expansive map, i.e., a map that has Lipschitz constant strictly greater than one under any remetrization. This is necessitated by the absence of positively expansive maps on the interval.

Sequences in finite fields yielding divisors of Mersenne, Fermat and Lehmer numbers, II

Let $\rho$ be an odd prime $\ge 11.$ In Part I, starting from an $M$-cycle in a finite field $\mathbb{F}_\rho$, we have established how the divisors of Mersenne, Fermat and Lehmer numbers arise. The converse question is taken up in this Part with the introduction of an arithmetic function and the notion of a split-associated prime.

Syrian futures: Percolation, temporality and historical experience in the plural

ABSTRACT A key ambition of this introduction is to bring the question of temporality to the centre of anthropological engagements with Syria and the diverse legacies of the past thirteen years of upheaval. Engaging with temporality, tempo and tempus are central to this endeavour. How can we, as scholars, speak across the moving and malleable terrain of discrepant Syrian experiences that are themselves moving in time - that are speaking back to what happened and holding on to hopes and futures envisioned in the past, while simultaneously moving towards new and different understandings and futures? By way of introduction to the issue, this article offers some theoretical reflections on this question in conversation with Syrians' varied and changing engagements with the past, which are crucial to comprehending how Syrians are moving towards the future, or more accurately different futures. Centrally, the text advances an understanding of how time and history not simply flow but rather, as Michel Serres points to, they percolate. Attending to such percolation allows us to appreciate the plural Syrian engagements with the past, present, and future.

A Survey on Conversational AI Question answering System for Low Resource Language

Question-and-answer (QA) systems allow users to pose questions about the information accessible in a variety of formats, such as structured and unstructured information in natural languages. It contributes significantly to conversational artificial intelligence (AI), which has led to the creation of a novel research field on conversational question answering (CQA), in which a system is required to understand the provided context before engaging in multi-turn QA to satisfy a user's informational needs. While the majority of currently done research focuses on single-turn QA, pre-trained language models and the availability of large multi-turn QA datasets have recently made multi-turn QA more significant. This study aims to give a thorough analysis of the most recent CQA research trends, mostly based on publications that have been reviewed in recent years. Our data indicates a shift in the industry's preference for multi-turn QA over single-turn QA, which has numerous advantages for conversational AI. In order to create a solid basis for the field of CQA, this survey aims to serve as the pinnacle for the research community.

What else will I do when I start school? Preschoolers’ wh-questions in dinnertime conversations and their language development

While it is established that parental wh-questions, as a high-quality language input, are associated with child language outcome, less is known about the role of children’s wh-questions in their language development. This study examines whether children’s wh-questions during a dinnertime conversation are associated with their receptive and expressive language skills. The sample consists of a unique group of bilingual children: 32 Chinese preschoolers (aged 3–5 years) in Norway. At the onset of the study, parents self-recorded a dinnertime conversation with the target child and other family members present. Over the following year, we assessed children’s receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, and narrative skills in Chinese three times. Individual growth modeling revealed that concurrently, the density of children’s wh-questions was associated with children’s expressive vocabulary and narrative skills, but the association faded when controlling for family demographics. Significantly, even when accounting for all control variables, children’s wh-questions predicted their receptive vocabulary growth across one year. These findings underline children’s active role in shaping their language learning and development. This study also contributes to our understanding of bilingual children’s home language development. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

A Review on Conversational Question Answering (CQA)

The internet is constantly changing how people communicate with one another, manage their daily lives, and share the information. As a result of digitization, automated Question Answering Systems are becoming more important in extracting useful information from the knowledge sources. In general, Question Answering (QA)mechanisms are intended to answer a specific question only once (so-called single-turn).However, to satisfy a user's information needs, the Conversational Question Answering (CQA) system must grasp the given context and engage in multi-turn QA. While single-turn QA leads the majority of current research, multi-turn QA has rapidly gained prominence due to the availability of large-scale multi-turn QA datasets and the development of “pre-trained language models”. In this research paper, we have presented a comprehensive review on the Conversational Question Answer (CQA) field which includes need of CQA followed by categorization of QA system, list of available datasets and various evaluation metrics.

Personalize QA System with Contextual Memory using GooglePalm

Personalized Q&A System with Contextual memory using GooglePalm, LangChain in Ed-Tech Industry aims to build a CQA(Conversational Question Answer) system which is a interactive search systems that effectively serve information by interacting with users. Despite its effectiveness, challenges exist as human annotation is time consuming, inconsistent, and not scalable. To address this issue and investigate the applicability of large language models in conversational question-answering (CQA) simulation, we propose a simulation framework that employs Langchain, Google Palm LLMs. Here we will add a csv file which consists of frequently asked questions. Furthermore, we conduct extensive analyses to thoroughly examine the LLM performance by benchmarking state-of-the-art reading comprehension models on datasets. Our results reveal that the Service Provider LLM generates lengthier answers that tend to be more accurate and complete. This is an end to end LLM project based on Google Palm and Langchain. We are building a Q&A system for an ed-learning company. In particular, noting that it takes time for the user to speak, threading related to database searches is performed while the user is speaking.

The Πίστις Χριστοῦ Debate and Its Recent Developments

After introducing the πίστις Χριστοῦ debate, this article attempts to explain a paradigm shift that has led to the current debate. It then summarizes some recent developments in the subjective genitive view and some recent developments in the objective genitive view. It also introduces readers to a recently articulated ‘third view’ of πίστις Χριστοῦ. Finally, it offers the author’s view of the question in conversation with some of the scholars mentioned in the article.

Center-retained fine-tuning for conversational question ranking through unsupervised center identification

Given a conversation context, conversational question ranking (CQR) aims to select a proper question from a candidate pool to clarify users’ ambiguous information needs. Most state-of-the-art CQR methods are pre-training based, which seek to design various fine-tuning tasks by randomly manipulating utterances in the context. However, existing fine-tuning methods will occasionally remove the center utterances (i.e., the referent utterances in the context for the clarification questions), which might result in counterproductive effect as the center utterances have high semantic coherence with the clarification questions. In this work, we introduce an unsupervised center-aware ranking (UCAR) framework, which first identifies the center utterance and then conducts fine-tuning by retaining the center. To identify the center, we devise a multi-perspective center identification (MCD) module and optimize it in an unsupervised manner. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets with 20k test samples show that seven state-of-the-art baselines get improved by 1% ∼5% in terms of MRR equipped with UCAR. The results demonstrate that it indeed improves the performance by keeping semantic coherence in conversations when fine-tuning. In addition, the centers identified by our proposed unsupervised MCD module are of high quality, as validated by humans. Moreover, an ancillary advantage of UCAR is that it has good interpretability by referring to the center utterance in the conversation context.

The Moral Status of Self-Love in Early Reformed Ethics

Abstract Reformed moral philosophers in the period of early orthodoxy (ca. 1550–ca. 1650) continue a medieval tradition of engaging moral questions in conversation with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and they often address the moral status of self-love in connection with the virtue of friendship. There is broad agreement among these authors that self-love is not only not necessarily sinful, but that some kinds of self-love are morally good and that self-love is the source and rule for love of one’s neighbor. Lambert Daneau’s Ethices Christianae, however, stands in a more complex relationship to this consensus.

“What Is This Palestine, Anyway?”: Two Second-Generation Palestinian American Women Negotiate Roots and Routes

This article examines the process of identity formation as it pertains to two Palestinian American women in the United States, specifically in New York City. It considers the answer to a characteristically conversational question in the West: “What is this Palestine, anyway?” through a reading of Najla Said’s and Suheir Hammad’s memoirs, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013) and Drops of This Story (New York: Writers & Readers, 1996), respectively. While the memoirs are set in socioeconomically different parts of New York City, both narrators chronicle their complicated negotiations around issues of belonging, integration, self-worth, and body shame as second-generation Palestinian women in the United States. The paper argues for the necessity to narrate such experiences, or else risk being outwritten by various Others. Given the reality of “Palestine” geographically and politically, the literary space can be powerful in locating and registering an imagined postcolonial Palestinian experience today. It can coherently articulate a broken Self, rehabilitate body politics, retrace violently digressive journeys, find meaning in a confounding kind of nationalism, and resist dominant and hostile ideologies. Indeed, the act of narration could not only heal the fraught relations between the Palestinian Self and various Others, but can allow for the envisioning of a postcolonial space from within.

Generative retrieval for conversational question answering

Effective passage retrieval is crucial for conversation question answering (QA) but challenging due to the ambiguity of questions. Current methods rely on the dual-encoder architecture to embed contextualized vectors of questions in conversations. However, this architecture is limited in the embedding bottleneck and the dot-product operation. To alleviate these limitations, we propose generative retrieval for conversational QA (GCoQA). GCoQA assigns distinctive identifiers for passages and retrieves passages by generating their identifiers token-by-token via the encoder–decoder architecture. In this generative way, GCoQA eliminates the need for a vector-style index and could attend to crucial tokens of the conversation context at every decoding step. We conduct experiments on three public datasets over a corpus containing about twenty million passages. The results show GCoQA achieves relative improvements of +13.6% in passage retrieval and +42.9% in document retrieval. GCoQA is also efficient in terms of memory usage and inference speed, which only consumes 1/10 of the memory and takes in less than 33% of the time. The code and data are released at https://github.com/liyongqi67/GCoQA.

Assessing the Performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on the 2023 Japanese Nursing Examination.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to evaluate the changes in capabilities between the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT)-3.5 and GPT-4 versions of the large-scale language model ChatGPT within a Japanese medical context. Methods The study involved ChatGPT versions 3.5 and 4 responding to questions from the 112th Japanese National Nursing Examination (JNNE). The study comprised three analyses: correct answer rate and score rate calculations, comparisons between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, and comparisons of correct answer rates for conversation questions. Results ChatGPT versions 3.5 and 4 responded to 237 out of 238 Japanese questions from the 112th JNNE. While GPT-3.5 achieved an overall accuracy rate of 59.9%, failing to meet the passing standards in compulsory and general/scenario-based questions, scoring 58.0% and 58.3%, respectively, GPT-4 had an accuracy rate of 79.7%, satisfying the passing standards by scoring 90.0% and 77.7%, respectively. For each problem type, GPT-4 showed a higher accuracy rate than GPT-3.5. Specifically, the accuracy rates for compulsory questions improved from 58.0% with GPT-3.5 to 90.0% with GPT-4. For general questions, the rates went from 64.6% with GPT-3.5 to 75.6% with GPT-4. In scenario-based questions, the accuracy rates improved substantially from 51.7% with GPT-3.5 to 80.0% with GPT-4. For conversation questions, GPT-3.5 had an accuracy rate of 73.3% and GPT-4 had an accuracy rate of 93.3%. Conclusions The GPT-4 version of ChatGPT displayed performance sufficient to pass the JNNE, significantly improving from GPT-3.5. This suggests specialized medical training could make such models beneficial in Japanese clinical settings, aiding decision-making. However, user awareness and training are crucial, given potential inaccuracies in ChatGPT's responses. Hence, responsible usage with an understanding of its capabilities and limitations is vital to best support healthcare professionals and patients.

Specific facial signals associate with categories of social actions conveyed through questions.

The early recognition of fundamental social actions, like questions, is crucial for understanding the speaker's intended message and planning a timely response in conversation. Questions themselves may express more than one social action category (e.g., an information request "What time is it?", an invitation "Will you come to my party?" or a criticism "Are you crazy?"). Although human language use occurs predominantly in a multimodal context, prior research on social actions has mainly focused on the verbal modality. This study breaks new ground by investigating how conversational facial signals may map onto the expression of different types of social actions conveyed through questions. The distribution, timing, and temporal organization of facial signals across social actions was analysed in a rich corpus of naturalistic, dyadic face-to-face Dutch conversations. These social actions were: Information Requests, Understanding Checks, Self-Directed questions, Stance or Sentiment questions, Other-Initiated Repairs, Active Participation questions, questions for Structuring, Initiating or Maintaining Conversation, and Plans and Actions questions. This is the first study to reveal differences in distribution and timing of facial signals across different types of social actions. The findings raise the possibility that facial signals may facilitate social action recognition during language processing in multimodal face-to-face interaction.

On the Robustness of Dialogue History Representation in Conversational Question Answering: A Comprehensive Study and a New Prompt-based Method

Abstract Most work on modeling the conversation history in Conversational Question Answering (CQA) reports a single main result on a common CQA benchmark. While existing models show impressive results on CQA leaderboards, it remains unclear whether they are robust to shifts in setting (sometimes to more realistic ones), training data size (e.g., from large to small sets) and domain. In this work, we design and conduct the first large-scale robustness study of history modeling approaches for CQA. We find that high benchmark scores do not necessarily translate to strong robustness, and that various methods can perform extremely differently under different settings. Equipped with the insights from our study, we design a novel prompt-based history modeling approach and demonstrate its strong robustness across various settings. Our approach is inspired by existing methods that highlight historic answers in the passage. However, instead of highlighting by modifying the passage token embeddings, we add textual prompts directly in the passage text. Our approach is simple, easy to plug into practically any model, and highly effective, thus we recommend it as a starting point for future model developers. We also hope that our study and insights will raise awareness to the importance of robustness-focused evaluation, in addition to obtaining high leaderboard scores, leading to better CQA systems.1

A note on Halász’s Theorem in {mathbb {F}}_q[t

In the setting of the integers, Granville, Harper and Soundararajan showed that the upper bound in Halász’s Theorem can be improved for smoothly supported functions. We derive the analogous result for Halász’s Theorem in {mathbb {F}}_q[t], and then consider the converse question of when the general upper bound in this version of Halász’s Theorem is actually attained.

Moral Education Through the Fostering of Reasoning Skills

The development of reasoning skills is often regarded as a central goal of ethics and philosophy classes in school education. In light of recent studies from the field of moral psychology, however, it could be objected that the promotion of such skills might fail to meet another important objective, namely the moral education of students. In this paper, I will argue against such pessimism by suggesting that the fostering of reasoning skills can still contribute to the aims of moral education. To do so, I will engage with the concept of moral education, point out different ways in which reasoning skills play an essential role in it, and support these considerations by appealing to further empirical studies. My conclusion will be that the promotion of ethical reasoning skills fulfils two important aims of moral education: First, it enables students to critically reflect on their ethical beliefs. Second, it allows them to explore ethical questions in a joint conversation with others. Lastly, I will refer to education in the field of sustainable development in order to exemplify the importance of these abilities.

Reflections on Bain, Political Theology of International Order

William Bain sustains his audacious claim to write a landmark in international relations thought. His view that the medieval theological debate between imposed order and immanent order structures contemporary thought about international order is largely compelling, especially in light of his demonstration that certain thinkers such as Hobbes and Grotius served as transmission belts, carrying this debate into modernity. He also persuasively shows that imposed order, or nominalism, dominates today’s schools of international relations thought, while immanent order only whispers its dissent. I raise two questions in critical conversation. First, while Bain argues persuasively that political theology persists after Westphalia, which he seeks to debunk as a milestone in secularization, nevertheless Westphalia stands as a milestone in the marginalization of religion (though not political theology) as an influential force in politics. Second, while Bain demurs from choosing between imposed and immanent order on normative grounds, his claim that the choice is a matter of faith appears to be a choice for imposed order. Clarifying this normative question is an apposite task for this important author’s next book.