Pragmatic Studies of Politeness in Chinese and English Culture

Polite words and expression can shorten the communication distance,ease the tension and conflict. As cultures are diverse, politeness is diverse. This paper is mean to explain the politeness in pragmatic use and its cultural specificity.

Binary Hybrid Artificial Hummingbird with Flower Pollination Algorithm for Feature Selection in Parkinson’s Disease Diagnosis

Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that inflicts irreversible damage on humans.Some experimental data regarding Parkinson’s patients are redundant and irrelevant,posing significant challenges for disease detection.Therefore,there is a need to devise an effective method for the selective extraction of disease-specific information,ensuring both accuracy and the utilization of fewer features.In this paper,a Binary Hybrid Artificial Hummingbird and Flower Pollination Algorithm(FPA),called BFAHA,is proposed to solve the problem of Parkinson’s disease diagnosis based on speech signals.First,combining FPA with Artificial Hummingbird Algorithm(AHA)can take advantage of the strong global exploration ability possessed by FPA to improve the disadvantages of AHA,such as premature convergence and easy falling into local optimum.Second,the Hemming distance is used to determine the difference between the other individuals in the population and the optimal individual after each iteration,if the difference is too significant,the cross-mutation strategy in the genetic algorithm(GA)is used to induce the population individuals to keep approaching the optimal individual in the random search process to speed up finding the optimal solution.Finally,an S-shaped function converts the improved algorithm into a binary version to suit the characteristics of the feature selection(FS)tasks.In this paper,10 high-dimensional datasets from UCI and the ASU are used to test the performance of BFAHA and apply it to Parkinson’s disease diagnosis.Compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms,BFAHA shows excellent competitiveness in both the test datasets and the classification problem,indicating that the algorithm proposed in this study has apparent advantages in the field of feature selection.

IBMSMA: An Indicator-based Multi-swarm Slime Mould Algorithm for Multi-objective Truss Optimization Problems

This work proposes an improved multi-objective slime mould algorithm, called IBMSMA, for solving the multi-objective truss optimization problem. In IBMSMA, the chaotic grouping mechanism and dynamic regrouping strategy are employed to improve population diversity;the shift density estimation is used to assess the superiority of search agents and to provide selection pressure for population evolution;and the Pareto external archive is utilized to maintain the convergence and distribution of the non-dominated solution set. To evaluate the performance of IBMSMA, it is applied to eight multi-objective truss optimization problems. The results obtained by IBMSMA are compared with other 14 well-known optimization algorithms on hypervolume, inverted generational distance and spacing-to-extent indicators. The Wilcoxon statistical test and Friedman ranking are used for statistical analysis. The results of this study reveal that IBMSMA can find the Pareto front with better convergence and diversity in less time than state-of-the-art algorithms, demonstrating its capability in tackling large-scale engineering design problems.