Contrastive rhetoric examines differences and similarities in writing across cultures. Although mainly concerned with student essay writing in its Ž rst 30 years, the area of study today contributes to knowledge about preferred patterns of writing in many English for speciŽ c purposes situations. This article discusses some of the new directions contrastive rhetoric has taken. Following a brief...

This paper studies contrastive divergence (CD) learning algorithm and proposes a new algorithm for training restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs). We derive that CD is a biased estimator of the log-likelihood gradient method and make an analysis of the bias. Meanwhile, we propose a new learning algorithm called average contrastive divergence (ACD) for training RBMs. It is an improved CD algorith...