Sperry Univac speech communications technology

Technology and systems for effective verbal communication with computers were developed. A continuous speech recognition system for verbal input, a word spotting system to locate key words in conversational speech, prosodic tools to aid speech analysis, and a prerecorded voice response system for speech output are described

Proceedings: Voice Technology for Interactive Real-Time Command/Control Systems Application

Speech understanding among researchers and managers, current developments in voice technology, and an exchange of information concerning government voice technology efforts are discussed

The integration of automatic speech recognition into the air traffic control system

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1990.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-94).by Joakim Karlsson.M.S

Towards multi-domain speech understanding with flexible and dynamic vocabulary

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (p. 201-208).In developing telephone-based conversational systems, we foresee future systems capable of supporting multiple domains and flexible vocabulary. Users can pursue several topics of interest within a single telephone call, and the system is able to switch transparently among domains within a single dialog. This system is able to detect the presence of any out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, and automatically hypothesizes each of their pronunciation, spelling and meaning. These can be confirmed with the user and the new words are subsequently incorporated into the recognizer lexicon for future use. This thesis will describe our work towards realizing such a vision, using a multi-stage architecture. Our work is focused on organizing the application of linguistic constraints in order to accommodate multiple domain topics and dynamic vocabulary at the spoken input. The philosophy is to exclusively apply below word-level linguistic knowledge at the initial stage. Such knowledge is domain-independent and general to all of the English language. Hence, this is broad enough to support any unknown words that may appear at the input, as well as input from several topic domains. At the same time, the initial pass narrows the search space for the next stage, where domain-specific knowledge that resides at the word-level or above is applied. In the second stage, we envision several parallel recognizers, each with higher order language models tailored specifically to its domain. A final decision algorithm selects a final hypothesis from the set of parallel recognizers.(cont.) Part of our contribution is the development of a novel first stage which attempts to maximize linguistic constraints, using only below word-level information. The goals are to prevent sequences of unknown words from being pruned away prematurely while maintaining performance on in-vocabulary items, as well as reducing the search space for later stages. Our solution coordinates the application of various subword level knowledge sources. The recognizer lexicon is implemented with an inventory of linguistically motivated units called morphs, which are syllables augmented with spelling and word position. This first stage is designed to output a phonetic network so that we are not committed to the initial hypotheses. This adds robustness, as later stages can propose words directly from phones. To maximize performance on the first stage, much of our focus has centered on the integration of a set of hierarchical sublexical models into this first pass. To do this, we utilize the ANGIE framework which supports a trainable context-free grammar, and is designed to acquire subword-level and phonological information statistically. Its models can generalize knowledge about word structure, learned from in-vocabulary data, to previously unseen words. We explore methods for collapsing the ANGIE models into a finite-state transducer (FST) representation which enables these complex models to be efficiently integrated into recognition. The ANGIE-FST needs to encapsulate the hierarchical knowledge of ANGIE and replicate ANGIE's ability to support previously unobserved phonetic sequences ...by Grace Chung.Ph.D

Heterogeneous acoustic measurements and multiple classifiers for speech recognition

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (p. 165-173).by Andrew K. Halberstadt.Ph.D

Reflections on Emotions, Populism and Polarisation : HEPP2 Conference proceedings

Non peer reviewe

Investigating Personal Intelligent Agents in Everyday Life through a Behavioral Lens

Personal intelligent agents (PIA), such as Apple’s Siri, Google Now, Facebook’s M, and Microsoft’s Cortana, are pervading our lives. These systems are taking the shape of a companion, and acting on our behalf to help us manage our everyday activities. The proliferation of these PIAs is largely due to their wide availability on mobile devices which themselves have become commonly available for billions of people. Our continuous interaction with these PIAs is impacting our sense of self, sense of being human, perception of technology, and relationships with others. The Information Systems (IS) literature on PIAs has been scarce. In this dissertation, we investigate the users’ relationship with PIAs in pre- and post-adoption contexts. We create and develop scales for two new constructs, perceived intelligence and perceived anthropomorphism, which are essential to investigate the holistic users’ experience with PIAs and similar systems. We also investigate perceptions of self-extension and possible antecedents of self-extension for the first time in IS. Additionally, we explore design issues with PIAs and examine voice and humor, which are independently present in currently available PIAs. Humor is a pervasive social phenomenon that shapes the dynamics of human interactions and is investigated for the first time in an IS experiment. We find that the current adoption and continuance of use models may not be sufficient to investigate the adoption and continuance of use of PIAs and similar systems since they do not capture the whole interaction between the user and the PIA. Our results underline the important role of the new perceptions, the utilitarian and hedonic aspects of use, and the cognitive and emotional trust in these social actors. Our findings highlight an astonishing change in the users’ perception of technology from being a tool distant from the self to a tool that they develop emotional connections with and consider part of their self-identity. This dissertation’s findings provide interesting theoretical and practical implications and stress a changing relationship between the user and the technology with this new wave of systems. Our research answers important questions in the context of PIAs’ adoption and continued used, contributes to various streams in the IS literature (adoption, continuance of use, trust, intelligence, anthropomorphism, dual-purpose IS, and self-extension) and creates new opportunities for future research

The causes and consequences of divergence between the air traffic controller state awareness and actual system state

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "February 2018."Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-195).Divergence is an inconsistency between the human's system state awareness and the actual system state. This research investigated divergence potential in air traffic controllers and identified controller divergence causes and consequences. Based on this investigation, approaches to minimize controller divergence and its consequences were identified for current air traffic control systems and future systems where unmanned aircraft will be integrated. Prior studies identified pilot divergence as a factor in several recent aircraft accidents and could be a factor for controllers. The future addition of unmanned aircraft in national airspace is a significant change which will affect the pilot and controller relationship and presents an opportunity to consider divergence before procedures are developed. To understand how to minimize divergence and its consequences, this research developed a divergence cause and consequence framework and a cognitive process framework. The cause and consequence framework was developed using established risk analysis methods. The cognitive process framework was developed using established cognitive process and human error approaches. This research refined these frameworks and demonstrated their utility in an investigation of historical air traffic control accidents. They were then used to identify divergence vulnerabilities in a future unmanned aircraft-integrated national airspace. Air traffic control cases were analyzed between 2011 and 2015 using the framework to understand causes and consequences of controller divergence. Twenty-seven (sixty-four percent) of these cases contained controller divergence contributing to the hazardous consequence. Although divergence causes and states varied, the most common event sequence included a diverged controller inducing an aircraft-to-aircraft conflict. These cases provided insight for system mitigations to reduce divergence causes and the consequentiality should it occur. The potential emergence of controller divergence with the integration of unmanned aircraft in national airspace was then investigated. Field studies of controllers experienced managing unmanned aircraft identified important differences between manned and unmanned aircraft. The framework was then used to analyze these potential divergence vulnerabilities. Observables, specifically intent, appear more challenging to perceive yet crucial for controller projection of unmanned aircraft position due to their lack of onboard human perception, lost link, and automated operations. Hazardous consequences may be more likely due to the inability for unmanned aircraft to provide mitigations.Material is based upon work supported under Air Force Contract FA8721-05-C-0002 and/or FA8702-15-D-0001by Brandon R. Abel.Ph. D

An Ethnographic Investigation of Compensatory Strategies in Aphasia. (Volumes I and II).

An ethnographic investigation of compensatory strategies in two individuals with nonfluent aphasia was undertaken. Data were collected from videorecordings of natural conversations between subjects and a variety of partners, observations of speech-language pathology assessment and therapy sessions, participant observations, ethnographic interviews, lamination sessions and documentary evidence. Data were analyzed to identify compensatory strategies employed by the aphasic subjects, to determine patterns of occurrence and functions of compensatory strategies, to determine the expectations and practices of speech-language pathologists, and to identify underlying themes relative to compensatory strategy usage. An operational definition of compensatory strategy was derived from the data, and every compensatory strategy used by each subject was identified in videorecorded samples and subjected to behavioral coding across 38 dimensions of relevant contextual variables. Usage patterns and a rich, authentic description of 25 compensatory behaviors were drawn from these data and triangulated with observations, interviews and lamination sessions to ensure reliability and authenticity. Results indicated that subjects adopted a variety of idiosyncratic, contextually flexible compensatory strategies to satisfy transactional and interactional goals of communication. Identified compensatory behaviors included strategies specifically taught by the speech-language pathologists and natural, untrained compensations. Compensatory strategies were adjusted to contexts and conversational goals. The usage patterns suggested several overall motivations including: the need to exchange information, the drive to conserve energy, the desire to maintain autonomy, and the need for social acceptance. Although speech-language pathologists interviewed and the aphasia literature reviewed defined strategies primarily in terms of message transmission , many of the compensations adopted by the subjects subserved the goal of promoting interaction rather than conveying information. In fact, the flexibility and contextual sensitivity of compensatory strategies indicated the primacy of social motivations in communication. The results raised questions about traditional definitions of compensatory strategies and traditional aphasia management practices, and suggested the need to employ socially driven models of communication in aphasia