The advent of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks for English, such as GLUE and SuperGLUE allows new NLU models to be evaluated across a diverse set of tasks. These comprehensive benchmarks have facilitated a broad range of research and applications in natural language processing (NLP). The problem, however, is that most such benchmarks are limited to English, which has made it difficult to replicate many of the successes in English NLU for other languages. To help remedy this issue, we introduce the first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark. CLUE is an open-ended, community-driven project that brings together 9 tasks spanning several well-established single-sentence/sentence-pair classification tasks, as well as machine reading comprehension, all on original Chinese text. To establish results on these tasks, we report scores using an exhaustive set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models (9 in total). We also introduce a number of supplementary datasets and additional tools to help facilitate further progress on Chinese NLU. Our benchmark is released at https://www.CLUEbenchmarks.com

Soil labile organic carbon fractions and soil organic carbon stocks as affected by long-term organic and mineral fertilization regimes in the North ChinaPlain.

Background and aims:The major risk factors for acute hepatitis B (AHB) in China and the viral factors determining the progression from acute to chronic hepatitis B remain largely unknown.Methods:Epidemiological studies within a population-based surveillance for AHB in adults were performed in Shanghai, China, including 294 patients, 588 matched controls and 572 family members of the patients.Results:Invasive medical procedures, household contact with hepatitis B virus (HBV) carriers, body care and beauty treatments, and lack of HBV vaccination were independently associated with AHB. Among those risks, pedicure in bath centres emerged. Sixty-eight of 128 patients with AHB were genotyped including 33 with HBV B2 and 35 with HBV C2. Twenty-five (8.50%) of the 294 patients, including 20 with HBV C2 and 5 with HBV B2 (p = 0.013), progressed to chronic infection. Multivariate analysis showed that HBV C2 was independently associated with chronicification of AHB. Patients with HBV B2 were younger and there was a higher proportion of women than those with HBV C2. The prevalence of HBV B2 was higher in the patients than in neighbourhood chronic carriers. The chronic carriers with HBV B2 showed higher viral loads, higher hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg) seropositivity, and with higher proportion in men than those with HBV C2, implying that sexual contact plays a role in the transmission of HBV B2. Phylogenetic analysis showed that HBV C2 was frequently involved in transmissions within households.Conclusions:Despite lower viral load and HBeAg status in the chronic carriers, HBV C2 was more prone to causing chronic infection than was HBV B2.

Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) has been reported from greater than 20 provinces in China. The number of reported cases has increased markedly in recent years and surpassed 80,000 human cases in 1983. All of the cases reported before 1981 were from rural areas and were attributed to Apodemus rats. In 1981, outbreaks of cases associated with house rats were first reported. Cases associated with Apodemus agrarius were more severe than those associated with the house rat Rattus norvegicus. The rate of inapparent infection in the rural population of areas endemic for Apodemus-associated disease was lower than that of Rattus-associated urban disease. After the onset of the disease, IgG antibody levels increase rapidly, peak after one week, and persist for as long as 25 years. Lung tissues from 16 species of rodent, from two species of sorex, and from cats and weasels in the epidemic areas have been found to carry antigen. A. agrarius, Apodemus peninsulae, and R. norvegicus serve as the main reservoirs of HFRS in rural areas, forest areas, and urban areas, respectively.