Audio-visual speech processing system for Polish applicable to human-computer interaction

This paper describes audio-visual speech recognition system for Polish language and a set of performance tests under various acoustic conditions. We first present the overall structure of AVASR systems with three main areas: audio features extraction, visual features extraction and subsequently, audiovisual speech integration. We present MFCC features for audio stream with standard HMM modeling technique, then we describe appearance and shape based visual features. Subsequently we present two feature integration techniques, feature concatenation and model fusion. We also discuss the results of a set of experiments conducted to select best system setup for Polish, under noisy audio conditions. Experiments are simulating human-computer interaction in computer control case with voice commands in difficult audio environments. With Active Appearance Model (AAM) and multistream Hidden Markov Model (HMM) we can improve system accuracy by reducing Word Error Rate for more than 30%, comparing to audio-only speech recognition, when Signal-to-Noise Ratio goes down to 0dB

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Multimodaalsel emotsioonide tuvastamisel põhineva inimese-roboti suhtluse arendamine

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsiooneÜks afektiivse arvutiteaduse peamistest huviobjektidest on mitmemodaalne emotsioonituvastus, mis leiab rakendust peamiselt inimese-arvuti interaktsioonis. Emotsiooni äratundmiseks uuritakse nendes süsteemides nii inimese näoilmeid kui kakõnet. Käesolevas töös uuritakse inimese emotsioonide ja nende avaldumise visuaalseid ja akustilisi tunnuseid, et töötada välja automaatne multimodaalne emotsioonituvastussüsteem. Kõnest arvutatakse mel-sageduse kepstri kordajad, helisignaali erinevate komponentide energiad ja prosoodilised näitajad. Näoilmeteanalüüsimiseks kasutatakse kahte erinevat strateegiat. Esiteks arvutatakse inimesenäo tähtsamate punktide vahelised erinevad geomeetrilised suhted. Teiseks võetakse emotsionaalse sisuga video kokku vähendatud hulgaks põhikaadriteks, misantakse sisendiks konvolutsioonilisele tehisnärvivõrgule emotsioonide visuaalsekseristamiseks. Kolme klassifitseerija väljunditest (1 akustiline, 2 visuaalset) koostatakse uus kogum tunnuseid, mida kasutatakse õppimiseks süsteemi viimasesetapis. Loodud süsteemi katsetati SAVEE, Poola ja Serbia emotsionaalse kõneandmebaaside, eNTERFACE’05 ja RML andmebaaside peal. Saadud tulemusednäitavad, et võrreldes olemasolevatega võimaldab käesoleva töö raames loodudsüsteem suuremat täpsust emotsioonide äratundmisel. Lisaks anname käesolevastöös ülevaate kirjanduses väljapakutud süsteemidest, millel on võimekus tunda äraemotsiooniga seotud ̆zeste. Selle ülevaate eesmärgiks on hõlbustada uute uurimissuundade leidmist, mis aitaksid lisada töö raames loodud süsteemile ̆zestipõhiseemotsioonituvastuse võimekuse, et veelgi enam tõsta süsteemi emotsioonide äratundmise täpsust.Automatic multimodal emotion recognition is a fundamental subject of interest in affective computing. Its main applications are in human-computer interaction. The systems developed for the foregoing purpose consider combinations of different modalities, based on vocal and visual cues. This thesis takes the foregoing modalities into account, in order to develop an automatic multimodal emotion recognition system. More specifically, it takes advantage of the information extracted from speech and face signals. From speech signals, Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, filter-bank energies and prosodic features are extracted. Moreover, two different strategies are considered for analyzing the facial data. First, facial landmarks' geometric relations, i.e. distances and angles, are computed. Second, we summarize each emotional video into a reduced set of key-frames. Then they are taught to visually discriminate between the emotions. In order to do so, a convolutional neural network is applied to the key-frames summarizing the videos. Afterward, the output confidence values of all the classifiers from both of the modalities are used to define a new feature space. Lastly, the latter values are learned for the final emotion label prediction, in a late fusion. The experiments are conducted on the SAVEE, Polish, Serbian, eNTERFACE'05 and RML datasets. The results show significant performance improvements by the proposed system in comparison to the existing alternatives, defining the current state-of-the-art on all the datasets. Additionally, we provide a review of emotional body gesture recognition systems proposed in the literature. The aim of the foregoing part is to help figure out possible future research directions for enhancing the performance of the proposed system. More clearly, we imply that incorporating data representing gestures, which constitute another major component of the visual modality, can result in a more efficient framework

Towards Avatars with Artificial Minds: Role of Semantic Memory

he first step towards creating avatars with human-like artificial minds is to give them human-like memory structures with an access to general knowledge about the world. This type of knowledge is stored in semantic memory. Although many approaches to modeling of semantic memories have been proposed they are not very useful in real life applications because they lack knowledge comparable to the common sense that humans have, and they cannot be implemented in a computationally efficient way. The most drastic simplification of semantic memory leading to the simplest knowledge representation that is sufficient for many applications is based on the Concept Description Vectors (CDVs) that store, for each concept, an information whether a given property is applicable to this concept or not. Unfortunately even such simple information about real objects or concepts is not available. Experiments with automatic creation of concept description vectors from various sources, including ontologies, dictionaries, encyclopedias and unstructured text sources are described. Haptek-based talking head that has an access to this memory has been created as an example of a humanized interface (HIT) that can interact with web pages and exchange information in a natural way. A few examples of applications of an avatar with semantic memory are given, including the twenty questions game and automatic creation of word puzzles

Design of a Controlled Language for Critical Infrastructures Protection

We describe a project for the construction of controlled language for critical infrastructures protection (CIP). This project originates from the need to coordinate and categorize the communications on CIP at the European level. These communications can be physically represented by official documents, reports on incidents, informal communications and plain e-mail. We explore the application of traditional library science tools for the construction of controlled languages in order to achieve our goal. Our starting point is an analogous work done during the sixties in the field of nuclear science known as the Euratom Thesaurus.JRC.G.6-Security technology assessmen

Verbal dominance vs. temperamental and anxiety variables of FL university students

Głównym tematem artykułu są przeprowadzone badania nad relacją pomiędzy poziomemilościowej dominacji werbalnej wśród studentów anglistyki a ich cechami indywidualnymi(osobowościowymi). Wskaźniki poziomu dominacji poszczególnych studentów obejmują rozmowność,częstotliwość inicjowania oraz średnią długość segmentu czasowego dominacji (Mean Chunk Length), określone na podstawie obserwacji zajęć z konwersacji w języku angielskim,w szczególności dyskusji, w których udział bierze grupa jako całość, lecz uczestnicy spontaniczniezabierają głos, bez wskazywania kolejnego rozmówcy. Różnice indywidualne, określoneprzy pomocy kwestionariuszy osobowości, obejmują cechy temperamentu (właściwości centralnegosystemu nerwowego, ekstrawersję i neurotyzm) oraz poziom lęku (jako cechy i jakostanu). Przedstawiono wykorzystany w badaniu schemat obserwacji służący określaniu dominacjiwśród uczestników oraz wyniki analizy korelacyjnej zmiennych. Wyniki wskazują na istnieniezwiązku pomiędzy obserwowaną strukturą dominacji werbalnej a badanymi różnicami indywidualnymi

The moral foreign language effect is stable across presentation modalities

YesPeoples’ judgments and decisions often change when made in their foreign language. Existing research testing this foreign language effect has predominantly used text-based stimuli with little research focusing on the impact of listening to audio stimuli on the effect. The only existing study on this topic found shifts in people’s moral decisions only in the audio modality. Firstly, by reanalyzing the data from this previous study and by collecting data in an additional experiment, we found no consistent effects of using foreign language on moral judgments. Secondly, in both datasets we found no significant language by modality interaction. Overall, our results highlight the need for more robust testing of the foreign language effect, and its boundary conditions. However, modality of presentation does not appear to be a candidate for explaining its variability. Data and materials for this experiment are available at https://osf.io/qbjxn/