Cyberspace is a factitious environment without solid boundary which makes it very different from the physical world. This fact has a significant meaning when personal jurisdiction issue is discussed because physical boundary is generally an important consideration in the issue of jurisdiction. Whether or how the ordinary rule would still apply to Cyberspace and whether a new standard should replace such ordinary rule are vigorously discussed in the state sovereignty. Diverse approaches in different state sovereignties under the current situation related to the physically out-of-state defendant make the jurisdiction issue highly unpredictable within Cyberspace. In this article, different approaches are introduced to deal with the jurisdictional issue over physically out-of-state defendants in different state sovereignties. Besides explaining different approaches, this article will also discuss and analyze several tentative solutions brought up by commentators to show that they are not all satisfactory to some extent with regard to this issue. Then, this article will try to come up with some kind of legal infrastructure in order to encounter the current complex situation in the issue of Cyberspace jurisdiction, especially to the physically out-of-state defendant situation, which is the main purpose in this article. Last but not the least, this article might also contribute to possible future legislative modification in state sovereignty.

A new duration modeling approach for Mandarin speech is proposed. It explicitly takes several major affecting factors, such as multiplicative companding factors (CFs), and estimates all model parameters by an EM algorithm. The three basic Tone 3 patterns (i.e., full tone, half tone and sandhi tone) are also properly considered using three different CFs to separate how they affect syllable duration. Experimental results show that the variance of the syllable duration is greatly reduced from 180.17 to 2.52 frame/sup 2/ (1 frame = 5 ms) by the syllable duration modeling to eliminate effects from those affecting factors. Moreover, the estimated CFs of those affecting factors agree well with our prior linguistic knowledge. Two extensions of the duration modeling method are also performed. One is the use of the same technique to model initial and final durations. The other is to replace the multiplicative model with an additive one. Lastly, a preliminary study of applying the proposed model to predict syllable duration for TTS (text-to-speech) is also performed. Experimental results show that it outperforms the conventional regressive prediction method.

In this paper, the multiplicative syllable duration model proposed previously for Mandarin speech is extended in some aspects. First, the three basic Tone 3 patterns (i.e., full tone, half tone and sandhi tone) are properly considered via using three different companding factors (CFs) to separate their affections. Second, the CFs of the model are analyzed in detail. Third, the syllable duration modeling method is applied to an automatically-segmented, 500-speaker, telephone-speech database. Fourth, a comparative study to parallelly construct an additive syllable duration model is done,

In this paper, a novel syllable duration modeling approach for Mandarin speech is proposed. It explicitly takes several main affecting factors as multiplicative companding parameters and estimates all model parameters by an EM algorithm. Experimental results show that the variance of the observed syllable duration is greatly reduced from 183.4 frame/sup 2/ (1 frame=5 ms) to 18.5 frame/sup 2/ by eliminating effects from these affecting factors. Besides, the estimated companding values of these affecting factors agree well with our prior linguistic knowledge. A preliminary study of applying the proposed model to predict syllable duration for TTS is also performed. Experimental results show that it outperforms the conventional regressive prediction method. Lastly, an extension of the approach to incorporate initial and final duration modeling is presented. This leads to a better understanding of the relation between the companding factors of initial and final duration models and those of syllable duration model.