Most words in natural languages are polysemous; that is, they have related but different meanings in different contexts. This one‐to‐many mapping of form to meaning presents a challenge to understanding how word meanings are learned, represented, and processed. Previous work has focused on solutions in which multiple static semantic representations are linked to a single word form, which fails to capture important generalizations about how polysemous words are used; in particular, the graded nature of polysemous senses, and the flexibility and (...) regularity of polysemy use. We provide a novel view of how polysemous words are represented and processed, focusing on how meaning is modulated by context. Our theory is implemented within a recurrent neural network that learns distributional information through exposure to a large and representative corpus of English. Clusters of meaning emerge from how the model processes individual word forms. In keeping with distributional theories of semantics, we suggest word meanings are generalized from contexts of different word tokens, with polysemy emerging as multiple clusters of contextually modulated meanings. We validate our results against a human‐annotated corpus of polysemy focusing on the gradedness, flexibility, and regularity of polysemous sense individuation, as well as behavioral findings of offline sense relatedness ratings and online sentence processing. The results provide novel insights into how polysemy emerges from contextual processing of word meaning from both a theoretical and computational point of view. (shrink)
This paper is an experiment in collective writing conducted in Autumn 2019 at the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University. The experiment involves 12 international masters' students readi...
This study concentrates on exploring the ‘logic’ of modern universities in China-a working concept that promotes a more in-depth discourse on the implicit illustrations of the ‘logic’ of universiti...
This study examines Chinese faculty ethical philosophy from a historical perspective. Historical perspective on Chinese faculty ethical philosophy embraces three major periods, including Ch...
From 1979 to 1999, a heated dispute over the science or pseudoscience of extraordinary power or extrasensory perception took place in China. During these two decades, many so-called “grandmasters” of ESP and Qigong emerged, and millions of people across the country studied with them; this was known as “Qigong Fever” or “ESP Fever.” The supporters of ESP argued that ESP existed, people could cultivate ESP through specific Qigong training, and ESP was a science; whereas the opponents of ESP denied all (...) of these. Both sides of the dispute had many supporters. With the onset of Qigong Fever in China, some Qigong and ESP masters developed their Qigong organizations into Chinese-style religions. Qigong Fever ended when the religions were banned by the Chinese government. The rise of Qigong Fever demonstrated that basic questions about the boundaries between science and pseudoscience were not easy to answer. Different theoretical and practical consequences resulted from different answers to these questions. (shrink)
As a result of the increasing public attention to environmental crises, corporate environmental actions and their effects are a current research hotspot. This study examines how two types of corporate environmental actions influence consumers’ perceptions of environmental legitimacy and subsequent purchase intentions. Using experimental method, this study finds that substantial environmental action induces significantly higher perceptions of environmental legitimacy than symbolic environmental action, this effect can be attenuated by corporate environmental reputation, and consumer-based environmental legitimacy has a significantly positive effect (...) on consumers’ purchase intentions. These findings have interesting implications for both researchers and practitioners involved in green marketing. (shrink)
This study examines the educational policy related to the inclusion of ethnic minority population in the contemporary China. It has undergone three stages of the educational policy transformation, including the beginning, development and perfection stages. It is characterized by the steadiness, caution, rapidity, quality improvement, standardization and quality. Through implementing the educational policy of the inclusion of ethnic minority population, it has made retrogress and achievements, which has played a positive role in national integration, maintaining national unity and regional stability, (...) improving the academic level and cross-cultural ability of minority students, and sharing educational resources. However, in current China’s education context, the implementation of education policy is faced with some prominent problems, such as the marginalized educational identity, non-communicative education, relative separation of systems and serious cultural barriers, relative emphasis on explicit education. Therefore, it suggested to construct a new integrative and open ethnic education system, strengthen the consciousness of the united integrated education, and enhancing the bi-directionality of ethnic integration. (shrink)
This study explores how China’s education responses to COVID-19 from a perspective of policy analysis. Specifically, it involves building an educational policy system for COVID-19 to examine educational governance framework, school management and teaching, policies for teachers during the epidemic. The education policy during the epidemic has achieved positive results. Those results aim to ensure the physical and mental health of teachers and students, ensure the supply of epidemic prevention materials and educational resources, ensure the quality of students' learning, and (...) enhance the application ability of teachers' teaching technology. The process of policy changes and effects of policy implementation have been examined to analyze how China’s education responses to COVID-19. The characteristics and experience of China's education policy in response to the epidemic concentrate on forming a governance system under the centralized and unified leadership of the Communist Party of China, building a pattern in which families and schools cooperate closely to promote the smooth development of education and teaching, transforming from an emergency substitute during the crisis into an important motivation to promote the transformation of education paradigm, and paying great attention to remote and poor areas and disadvantaged student groups. (shrink)
This study aims to critically and systematically investigate the contemporary discourse within scholarship on world-class universities in different higher education context. It applies critical discourse analysis to review articles from some top higher education academic journals and books published between 2000 and 2019. Exploring the notion of world-class university involves international-level identities and models, national-level policies and strategies, and institutional-level responses and practices. Findings highlight the absence of a clear definition of the concept of world-class university, an obvious Western-dominated value-laden (...) paradigm, hegemony of global rankings discourse, priority of policies and strategies and inexplicit suggestions for practical application of research findings. Applying the critical discourse analysis, we examine the mission of higher education research towards global competitiveness and global rankings and the attitudes towards the challenges in pursuing world-class universities and its dissemination through the international academic publications as value neutral. This study focuses on recognizing, articulating, and critiquing biases in research production and dissemination. Different researchers might provide multiple critical scopes to investigate international inclusive scholarship on world-class universities. This study also contributes to the approaches in which discourse both shapes and is shaped by globalization and internationalization trends in the higher education contexts, and future orientations in this study. (shrink)
This study explores “Strengthen Moral Education for Cultivating People” in China from the perspectives of concepts and policies. “Strengthen Moral Education” is identifi...
This study investigates how to create world-class universities in China from a policy mapping perspective. Specifically, policy connotations of creating world-class universities in China have been explored in this study. Policy mapping of creating world-class universities in China is mainly divided into two stages: Stage 1 focuses on the introduction and continuous improvement of the guiding overall plan; Stage 2 concentrates on conducting specific implementation plans, speeding up construction, and implementing them in colleges and universities. In addition, policy strategies on (...) further improving the “Double first class” construction policy are also examined in this study. (shrink)
Higher education with Chinese characteristics is inherently embedded in both Chinese traditional culture and Chinese modern political culture. This article examines the ontological conception of higher education with Chinese characteristics from both conceptual and political perspectives. First, by illustrating the Government agenda and politics for the construction of higher education with Chinese characteristics, this article explains the particular roles played by individual universities and colleges. The article then moves on to describe the ontological conceptual framework used in identifying higher education (...) with Chinese characteristics for the purpose of showing how higher education with Chinese characteristics differs from Western dominated higher education concepts and models. Both the distinction between the Eastern and Western contexts and the integration of the globalization and localization are involved in construction of the concept of higher education with Chinese characteristic. The final section considers the policy implications for the developing higher education with Chinese characteristics. (shrink)
To identify relationships among entities in natural language texts, extraction of entity relationships technically provides a fundamental support for knowledge graph, intelligent information retrieval, and semantic analysis, promotes the construction of knowledge bases, and improves efficiency of searching and semantic analysis. Traditional methods of relationship extraction, either those proposed at the earlier times or those based on traditional machine learning and deep learning, have focused on keeping relationships and entities in their own silos: extracting relationships and entities are conducted in (...) steps before obtaining the mappings. To address this problem, a novel Chinese relationship extraction method is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the triple is treated as an entity relation chain and can identify the entity before the relationship and predict its corresponding relationship and the entity after the relationship. Secondly, the Joint Extraction of Entity Mentions and Relations model is based on the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory and Maximum Entropy Markov Model. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model can achieve a precision of 79.2% which is much higher than that of traditional models. (shrink)
Pursuing world-class universities, China has emerged in recent decades as an increasingly popular destination for internationally mobile academics. The goal of this study was to identify current education policy dispositions toward foreign faculty at the national and institutional levels in China. Findings indicate that within China’s higher education policy discourse, foreign faculty are identified as an advantage, and a source of conflict, ultimately having an ambiguous role as they attempt to manage their complicated status in Chinese higher education institutions. Foreign (...) faculty are typically regarded as an international asset, accelerating global competitiveness and international rankings to enhance the acceleration of China’s higher education system. They are also considered controversial in relation to Chinese culture, values, and traditions. However, the most prevalent policy disposition explored in this study was that of vagueness and marginality, indicating underlying ambiguity toward foreign faculty. The study concludes with implications for future scholars and policymakers to consider. (shrink)
Head transplantation has ignited intense discussions about whether it should be done scientifically and ethically. This paper examines the ethics of head transplantation from a Confucian perspective and offers arguments against the permissibility of head transplantation. From a Confucian point of view, human beings are the most precious organisms in the world, and ren and li are the basic moral principles of human beings. As long as head transplant technology remains underdeveloped, this procedure should not be done because it will (...) pose a serious risk of harm to humans and thus violate the principles of Confucian ren and li. If head transplant technology matures to the point that it would be safe to try in humans, it still should not be performed because it would change the selfhood or identity of the head donor and the body donor and create a new person. Confucian personal virtues greatly depend on selfhood or personal identity, and selfhood or personal identity depend on one’s body cultivation and mind rectification. Through the hard effort of body cultivation and mind rectification, one transforms one’s selfhood or identity and personality. This selfhood, identity, and personality cannot be separated from one’s body but are embedded in one’s body. Thus, head transplant would destroy two persons’ identities and result in a new person, and the characteristics of this new person’s identity are still unknown. (shrink)
Green consumption values have been shown to motivate consumers to engage in green consumption practices. However, surprisingly little research has examined how green consumption values develop in young people. In the current study, we employed ecological socialization theory as a framework to investigate the process by which parents’ green consumption values shape similar values in their young adolescents. In Study 1, data from 722 Chinese families that included an early adolescent showed that both mothers’ and fathers’ green consumption values were (...) positively associated with early adolescents’ green consumption values, and this association was mediated by each parent’s environmentally responsible consumption behavior. Study 2 replicated the results of Study 1 using two waves of matched parent-adolescent data collected a month apart from another group of 477 Chinese families. Furthermore, Study 2 showed that the mediation process identified in Study 1 was evident only when there was a close parent–child relationship. These findings have implications for cultivating the green consumption values of today’s youth. The results also have heuristic value for future research on the ecological socialization and inter-generational transmission of pro-environmental values. (shrink)
Due to the increasing number of people traveling by air, the passenger flow at the airport is increasing, and the problem of passenger drop-off and pickup has a huge impact on urban traffic. The difficulty of taking a taxi at the airport is still a hot issue in the society. Aiming at the problem of optimizing the allocation of taxi resource, this paper is based on the cost-benefit analysis method to determine the factors that affect the taxi driver’s decision-making. The (...) mathematical methods such as function equation, BP neural network algorithm, and queuing theory were used to establish a complete decision-making model for taxi drivers and an optimization model of dispatching efficiency at the airport. A conclusion has been drawn that the allocation of airport taxi resource should be arranged closely related to drivers’ revenue and the layout of airport line. (shrink)
Since the bilateral commerce between the USA and China changes greatly and Chinese government continues to reform and delegate power in the economic field, it is of importance to study the Uniform Commercial Code of the USA. The study specifically studies the features of modal verbs in the UCC through the comparison with the United States Code and Frown. With the help of Antconc, the distribution of modal verbs, the modal value of the three sets of corpora are examined and (...) analyzed based on the theory of Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar. The results show that there are significant differences between the three sets of corpora and the three main features of modal verbs in the UCC are: the high frequency use of may, the relatively lower frequency use of legal modal verb shall, and the much higher frequency of must and may not. The seemingly contrary usages within the UCC are discussed and explained with the background of the legislation and the legal thoughts of the major legislator in a sociosemiotic approach. With both the quantitative and qualitative analysis combining the examples, the study hopes to shed light on the related legal translation and further enhance the understanding of the modal verbs in the UCC as well as legal discourse in a more general context. (shrink)
This study explores the macro education policy design on the vocational education system for the new generation of migrant workers in China. The content system of vocational education, the...
The development of biotechnologies has broadly interfered with a number of life processes, including human birth. An important moral question arises from the application of such medical technologies to birth: do biotechnological advancements violate human dignity? Many valid arguments have been raised. Yet bioethicists are still far from reaching a consensus on how best to protect the dignity of human birth. Confucianism is an influential ethical theory in China and presents a distinctive understanding of human dignity. In this paper, we (...) reconstruct the two Confucian concepts of dignity—namely, universal dignity and personal dignity. We then apply these concepts to human birth in the context of biotechnologies involving embryos and genetic enhancement. We conclude that the dual Confucian understanding of dignity contributes a valuable perspective to the question of whether biotechnologies related to human birth violate human dignity. (shrink)
In previous experiments on unconscious thought, information was presented to participants in one continuous session; however, in daily life, information is delivered in a temporally partitioned way. We examined whether unconscious thought could equally integrate temporally scattered information when making overall evaluations. When presenting participants with information in two temporally partitioned sessions, participants’ overall evaluation was based on neither the information in the first session nor that in the second session ; instead, information in both sessions were equally integrated to (...) reach a final judgment. Conscious thought, however, overemphasized information in the second session. Experiments 3 and 4 further ruled out possible influencing factors including differences in the distributions of positive/negative attributes in the first and second sessions and on-line judgment. These findings suggested that unconscious thought can integrate information from a wider range of periods during an evaluation, while conscious thought cannot. (shrink)
Death with dignity is a significant issue in modern bioethics. In modern healthcare, the wide use of new technologies at the end of life has caused heated debate on how to protect human dignity. The key point of contention lies in the different understandings of human dignity and the dignity of death. Human dignity has never been a clear concept in Western ethical explorations, and the dignity of death has given rise to more confusions. Although there is no such term (...) as “dignity” in Confucian ethics, there are discussions of a number of ideas related to human dignity and the dignity of death. Therefore, Confucian bioethics can offer a new perspective for understanding the theoretical difficulties associated with the dignity of death and new methods for solving them. In this article, we attempt to reconstruct Confucian views on human dignity and the dignity of death and, based on those views, to analyze the following issues: the relationship between the dignity of death and biological life, the relationship between the dignity of death and suffering, the relationship between the dignity of death and the autonomy of human beings, and the relationship between the dignity of death and social justice. This article will also compare the Confucian views on these issues with the views of Western philosophers. Confucian ethics can offer distinct answers to the above issues and help resolve some confusions concerning concepts and theories in Western research on the dignity of death. (shrink)
We conducted an intertemporal online experiment to examine the contagion of others’ positive and negative donation behaviors. We collected two sets of data during and after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. The participants donated to the charitable fund, “Against COVID-19, The China Charity Federation Is on the Move.” We further investigated the mediating effect of social anxiety on the link between the contagion of donation behaviors and the changes in the COVID-19 situation. A total of 1022 participants (...) participated in the intertemporal online experiment and were considered in the statistical analyses. Our findings were as follows. First, the donation behaviors of others significantly changed these participants’ initial donation decisions, with increased or decreased donation amounts being associated with a positive or negative donation behavior, respectively. Others’ positive donation behavior was more likely to nudge these participants into changing their initial decisions than negative donation behavior during the peak of the pandemic. However, such difference disappeared after the peak because the contagion of positive donation behavior significantly decreased along with the abatement of the pandemic. Second, the participants’ social anxiety decreased along with the abatement of the pandemic, and social anxiety completely mediated the relationship between the pandemic abatement and the decrease in the contagion of positive donation behaviors. These findings advance our understanding of the motivations and influence mechanism of individuals’ donation decisions in the current pandemic situation and help make informed policy making decisions. (shrink)
With the rapid development of livestreaming marketing in China, consumers spend an increasing amount of time watching and purchasing on the platform, which shows a trend of livestreaming addiction. In the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, the addiction exacerbated by a surge of boredom caused by home quarantine. Based on the observation of this phenomenon, this research focused on whether state boredom could facilitate consumers’ livestreaming addiction and explored the associated mechanisms of this relationship. Based on three studies, this (...) research found that state boredom had a positive effect on consumers’ livestreaming addiction, and this relationship worked through the mediating effect of consumers’ sensation seeking. We further verified a moderated mediation effect of consumers’ life meaning perception, where the indirect effect of state boredom on consumers’ livestreaming addiction via consumers’ sensation seeking existed for high and low levels of life meaning perception, but in opposite directions. The conclusions provided theoretical and practical implications of livestreaming marketing and healthy leisure consumption. (shrink)
Defamation law is a long-standing research focus. Previous studies on defamation law have pointed out the importance of balancing two fundamental issues in law, namely, protection of reputation and freedom of speech. The present corpus-based legal study, using ConcGram 1.0 as the analytical tool, examined the phraseological profile of reported cases on defamation in Hong Kong in order to find out the types of defense and the approach to meaning in the defamation case law in Hong Kong. Regarding defenses to (...) a defamation claim, the results show that fair comment, qualified privilege, and justification are the most prevalent types, that unintentional defamation is not used at all, and that there has been a noticeable shift from fair comment to honest comment. As for the approach to meaning, the ordinary and natural approach is found to be a pivotal means of solving the threshold problem in defamation cases, that is, whether the words involved are defamatory or not. (shrink)
This work attempts to respond to Tomas Aquinas' Cosmological Argument in a way that combines Set Theory with the idea of the ‘Book of Change’. The study defines the ith Cause Set on which to operate on, which leads to the ontological commitment of austerity that the ‘First Cause's Compromise with emergence’ cannot be avoided. It is argued in the present paper that the concept that ‘emergence only consists of Synchronic Emergence and Diachronic Emergence’ should be extended to a broader (...) notion of emergence, which is made up of the two discussed elements and a third one ‘No-Boundary Emergence’ (beyond the time dimension). The article defines the concept of No-Boundary Emergence, proves why it is a type of emergence that differs from the traditional two types, and asserts that it underlies the bottom layer of the cosmos. This study describes the common feature of all emergence as communication protocols between layers. The assemblage of all emergences behaves similar to a distributed system that cannot be restricted by Gödel's theorem. The paper provides evidence (in Big Bang Cosmology, Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, Superstring Theory, Quantum Gravity) for this point of view, and notes that emergence (in the context of No-Boundary Emergence) is not only a simple scientific theory but also a progressive scientific research programme that can spontaneously grow from scientific theory based on Platonism at the expense of a degenerating shift to the ontological commitment of austerity. This paper proposes an improved model of Schrödinger Cat that provides a new explanation for quantum measurement and argues that there must be a forbidden zone of thought experiments. The study also introduces the implications of ancient Chinese thoughts (namely, the ‘Book of Change’ and Confucius). The paper comes to the conclusion that emergence (crossing the gap between ‘being’ and ‘nothing’, while ignoring the forbidden zone of thought experiments) relieves ‘cosmological insufficiency’ in the sense of Neo-Aristotelism. (shrink)
Modality and negation, as two important linguistic features used to realise subjectivity, have been investigated within various disciplines, such as logic, linguistics and philosophy, and law. The interaction between modality and negation, as a relatively new and undeveloped domain, has however not been paid due attention in scholarship. This corpus-based study investigates three aspects of their interaction: the differentiation of the deontic value by negation, the categorization of deontic modality in Hong Kong legislation via negation, and distribution patterns of deontic (...) modality, especially distribution patterns of the negation of modality, in Hong Kong legislation. This study shows that negation is a powerful linguistic mechanism not only for determining the nature and functions of modality, but also for determining the value of modality. This study also reveals that negation helps us to investigate the distribution of deontic modality in Hong Kong legislation and hence revisit the legal framework in Hong Kong. A study taking into account the discursive and professional aspects of the interaction between deontic modality and negation will provide a theoretical basis for the natural language processing of modality and negation in legislation and also offer important implications for the study of negation and modality in general contexts. (shrink)
The definition of life is a very important issue in the philosophy of biology, but this issue has unfortunately been neglected by the mainstream philosopher of biology for many years. In this paper, the difficulties with and the reasons for defining life are illustrated, the characteristics of life on Earth are explored, ways of defining life are examined, the main definitions of life are explained and evaluated, and finally, a new information definition of life is proposed.
