24,378 research outputs found
Integrating Prosodic and Lexical Cues for Automatic Topic Segmentation
We present a probabilistic model that uses both prosodic and lexical cues for
the automatic segmentation of speech into topically coherent units. We propose
two methods for combining lexical and prosodic information using hidden Markov
models and decision trees. Lexical information is obtained from a speech
recognizer, and prosodic features are extracted automatically from speech
waveforms. We evaluate our approach on the Broadcast News corpus, using the
DARPA-TDT evaluation metrics. Results show that the prosodic model alone is
competitive with word-based segmentation methods. Furthermore, we achieve a
significant reduction in error by combining the prosodic and word-based
knowledge sources.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure
Prosody-Based Automatic Segmentation of Speech into Sentences and Topics
A crucial step in processing speech audio data for information extraction,
topic detection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and
topic units. Speech segmentation is challenging, since the cues typically
present for segmenting text (headers, paragraphs, punctuation) are absent in
spoken language. We investigate the use of prosody (information gleaned from
the timing and melody of speech) for these tasks. Using decision tree and
hidden Markov modeling techniques, we combine prosodic cues with word-based
approaches, and evaluate performance on two speech corpora, Broadcast News and
Switchboard. Results show that the prosodic model alone performs on par with,
or better than, word-based statistical language models -- for both true and
automatically recognized words in news speech. The prosodic model achieves
comparable performance with significantly less training data, and requires no
hand-labeling of prosodic events. Across tasks and corpora, we obtain a
significant improvement over word-only models using a probabilistic combination
of prosodic and lexical information. Inspection reveals that the prosodic
models capture language-independent boundary indicators described in the
literature. Finally, cue usage is task and corpus dependent. For example, pause
and pitch features are highly informative for segmenting news speech, whereas
pause, duration and word-based cues dominate for natural conversation.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures. To appear in Speech Communication 32(1-2),
Special Issue on Accessing Information in Spoken Audio, September 200
GumDrop at the DISRPT2019 Shared Task: A Model Stacking Approach to Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection
In this paper we present GumDrop, Georgetown University's entry at the DISRPT
2019 Shared Task on automatic discourse unit segmentation and connective
detection. Our approach relies on model stacking, creating a heterogeneous
ensemble of classifiers, which feed into a metalearner for each final task. The
system encompasses three trainable component stacks: one for sentence
splitting, one for discourse unit segmentation and one for connective
detection. The flexibility of each ensemble allows the system to generalize
well to datasets of different sizes and with varying levels of homogeneity.Comment: Proceedings of Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking
(DISRPT2019
Bootstrapping word alignment via word packing
We introduce a simple method to pack words for statistical word alignment. Our goal is to simplify the task of automatic word alignment by packing several consecutive words together when we believe they correspond to a single word in the opposite language. This is done using the word aligner itself, i.e. by bootstrapping on its output. We evaluate the performance of our approach on a Chinese-to-English machine translation task, and report a 12.2% relative increase in BLEU score over a state-of-the art phrase-based SMT system
Fast Rhetorical Structure Theory Discourse Parsing
In recent years, There has been a variety of research on discourse parsing,
particularly RST discourse parsing. Most of the recent work on RST parsing has
focused on implementing new types of features or learning algorithms in order
to improve accuracy, with relatively little focus on efficiency, robustness, or
practical use. Also, most implementations are not widely available. Here, we
describe an RST segmentation and parsing system that adapts models and feature
sets from various previous work, as described below. Its accuracy is near
state-of-the-art, and it was developed to be fast, robust, and practical. For
example, it can process short documents such as news articles or essays in less
than a second
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