Heat of Discussion: A New Approach to Understanding Parliamentary Discussion

This paper offers an overview of the video retrieval system we have developed for the Japanese Diet. With our video retrieval system one can directly retrieve the video feed segment of interest, gain a visual understanding of the flow of parliamentary debate, and check the facial expressions and body language of the speaker. In this paper, we demonstrate how one can retrieve video streaming on user terminals that do not support Japanese language input, and suggest a variety of ways in which our video retrieval system can be utilized. Also, we report a first systematic analysis on the correspondence between the official minutes and the results of speech recognition of recordings of parliamentary meetings. Departing from tradition of focusing on written official minutes, we investigate the variation in the rate of correspondence and understand complex and multifaceted nature of parliamentary discussion. We believe that our system encourages research on the utilization of visual information in policymaking and marks a step toward the provision of universal access to policy information.This work is supported by JSPS Kakenhi Grant Number 15H05727 and based on a paper prepared for presentation at the 25th IPSA World Congress of Political Science, Brisbane, Australia, July 21 - 26, 2018.http://www.grips.ac.jp/list/jp/facultyinfo/masuyama_mikitaka

Linking Parliamentary Minutes and Videos in the Japanese Diet

This paper offers an overview of the video retrieval system we have developed for the Japanese Diet. With our video retrieval system one can directly retrieve the video feed segment of interest, gain a visual understanding of the flow of parliamentary debate, and check the facial expressions and body language of the speaker. In this paper, we demonstrate how one can retrieve video streaming on user terminals that do not support Japanese language input, and suggest a variety of ways in which our video retrieval system can be utilized. Also, we report a preliminary analysis on the correspondence between the official minutes and the results of speech recognition of recordings of parliamentary meetings. We believe that our system encourages research on the utilization of visual information in policy-making and marks a step toward the provision of universal access to policy information.This work is supported by JSPS Kakenhi Grant Number 15H05727 and the Diet Archives Project funded by the GRIPS Policy Research Center.An earlier version (Masuyama 2016b) was presented at the 2016 General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, September 7-10, 2016.http://www.grips.ac.jp/list/jp/facultyinfo/masuyama_mikitaka

Semi-Supervised Acoustic Model Training by Discriminative Data Selection from Multiple ASR Systems' Hypotheses

While the performance of ASR systems depends on the size of the training data, it is very costly to prepare accurate and faithful transcripts. In this paper, we investigate a semisupervised training scheme, which takes the advantage of huge quantities of unlabeled video lecture archive, particularly for the deep neural network (DNN) acoustic model. In the proposed method, we obtain ASR hypotheses by complementary GMM-and DNN-based ASR systems. Then, a set of CRF-based classifiers is trained to select the correct hypotheses and verify the selected data. The proposed hypothesis combination shows higher quality compared with the conventional system combination method (ROVER). Moreover, compared with the conventional data selection based on confidence measure score, our method is demonstrated more effective for filtering usable data. Significant improvement in the ASR accuracy is achieved over the baseline system and in comparison with the models trained with the conventional system combination and data selection methods

Spartan Daily, April 8, 1983

Volume 80, Issue 42https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/7024/thumbnail.jp

Alignment Knowledge Distillation for Online Streaming Attention-based Speech Recognition

This article describes an efficient training method for online streaming attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. AED models have achieved competitive performance in offline scenarios by jointly optimizing all components. They have recently been extended to an online streaming framework via models such as monotonie chunkwise attention (MoChA). However, the elaborate attention calculation process is not robust against long-form speech utterances. Moreover, the sequence-level training objective and time-restricted streaming encoder cause a nonnegligible delay in token emission during inference. To address these problems, we propose CTC synchronous training (CTC-ST), in which CTC alignments are leveraged as a reference for token boundaries to enable a MoChA model to learn optimal monotonie input-output alignments. We formulate a purely end-to-end training objective to synchronize the boundaries of MoChA to those of CTC. The CTC model shares an encoder with the MoChA model to enhance the encoder representation. Moreover, the proposed method provides alignment information learned in the CTC branch to the attention-based decoder. Therefore, CTC-ST can be regarded as self-distillation of alignment knowledge from CTC to MoChA. Experimental evaluations on a variety of benchmark datasets show that the proposed method significantly reduces recognition errors and emission latency simultaneously. The robustness to long-form and noisy speech is also demonstrated. We compare CTC-ST with several methods that distill alignment knowledge from a hybrid ASR system and show that the CTC-ST can achieve a comparable tradeoff of accuracy and latency without relying on external alignment information

Substantive Representation of Women in Asian Parliaments

Combining data from nearly 100 interviews with national parliamentarians from ten Asian countries, the contributors to this book analyze and evaluate the advancement of gender equality in Asia. As of the year 2022, no country in Asia has gender parity in its parliament. Meanwhile, the proportion of national-level women parliamentarians in Asia averages a mere 20%. What is more important than simple descriptive representation, however, is whether outcomes for women are improving. Rather than focusing on numerical representation, the chapters in this book focus on the substantive representation of women. In other words, what do women and men parliamentarians do to advance women’s well-being and gender equality? Using semi-structured interviews, the author of each chapter examines these efforts in the context of a specific Asian country. The case studies include Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Timor-Leste. The book is an essential resource for scholars and students of Asian politics and the politics of gender

Proceedings of the COLING 2004 Post Conference Workshop on Multilingual Linguistic Ressources MLR2004

International audienceIn an ever expanding information society, most information systems are now facing the "multilingual challenge". Multilingual language resources play an essential role in modern information systems. Such resources need to provide information on many languages in a common framework and should be (re)usable in many applications (for automatic or human use). Many centres have been involved in national and international projects dedicated to building har- monised language resources and creating expertise in the maintenance and further development of standardised linguistic data. These resources include dictionaries, lexicons, thesauri, word-nets, and annotated corpora developed along the lines of best practices and recommendations. However, since the late 90's, most efforts in scaling up these resources remain the responsibility of the local authorities, usually, with very low funding (if any) and few opportunities for academic recognition of this work. Hence, it is not surprising that many of the resource holders and developers have become reluctant to give free access to the latest versions of their resources, and their actual status is therefore currently rather unclear. The goal of this workshop is to study problems involved in the development, management and reuse of lexical resources in a multilingual context. Moreover, this workshop provides a forum for reviewing the present state of language resources. The workshop is meant to bring to the international community qualitative and quantitative information about the most recent developments in the area of linguistic resources and their use in applications. The impressive number of submissions (38) to this workshop and in other workshops and conferences dedicated to similar topics proves that dealing with multilingual linguistic ressources has become a very hot problem in the Natural Language Processing community. To cope with the number of submissions, the workshop organising committee decided to accept 16 papers from 10 countries based on the reviewers' recommendations. Six of these papers will be presented in a poster session. The papers constitute a representative selection of current trends in research on Multilingual Language Resources, such as multilingual aligned corpora, bilingual and multilingual lexicons, and multilingual speech resources. The papers also represent a characteristic set of approaches to the development of multilingual language resources, such as automatic extraction of information from corpora, combination and re-use of existing resources, online collaborative development of multilingual lexicons, and use of the Web as a multilingual language resource. The development and management of multilingual language resources is a long-term activity in which collaboration among researchers is essential. We hope that this workshop will gather many researchers involved in such developments and will give them the opportunity to discuss, exchange, compare their approaches and strengthen their collaborations in the field. The organisation of this workshop would have been impossible without the hard work of the program committee who managed to provide accurate reviews on time, on a rather tight schedule. We would also like to thank the Coling 2004 organising committee that made this workshop possible. Finally, we hope that this workshop will yield fruitful results for all participants

Domestication of Thunnus thynnus – DOTT

The inception of the idea to domesticate the BFT as a European drive occurred while on a short sabbatical in Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Marine Policy Center in 1996. I was looking for a species or a group of species that will help close the developing gap between demand and supply of fish in the future, fish species that will serve, in times to come, as the “beef cattle” of the sea. I was looking for a species that has a fast growth rate, good ratio of edible meat to body weight (70%) and a wide temperature range. After screening many species, I have come to considering the Blue Fin Tuna (BFT) as a candidate Species for Future Mariculture. Controlling the life cycle of the BFT will also help maintaining and enhancing its wild population in the future by developing a re-stocking program. I aired the idea with a few colleagues (who became friends over the years) and received encouraging reactions (first stations; CIHEAM meeting in Tanger, Morocco, and then at the Univ. of Cadiz, Spain). It turned out that my idea was not an original one - a few countries had already launched national BFT domestication programs. The initiative came on fertile soil: 55 participants, 25 different R&D institutions and industry around the Med., including Non EU members (Malta, Cyprus, Tunisia, Morocco, Croatia and Israel). We decided to apply for a Concerted Action Program in the Fifth Framework Programme under the “Quality of life and management of living resources” key action of the European Commission – Parallel to the national initiatives in Europe, which were taken place in Spain, Italy and France. The objectives of the Concerted Action program were to prepare the RTD campaign, including priorities, interdisciplinary methodology, rational interactions amongst the different scientific disciplines and the cascade of steps for implementation. Emphasis was on Integration of Fishing Industry, the BFT Farming Industry, governments and the RTD Program. We tried to draw inferences from lessons learned in other countries such as the USA, Australia, and Japan and design our program accordingly. We put together a good proposal. However, the proposal was rejected based on it being too ambitious and too weak on the socio-economics aspects. Well, it was a set back and a disappointment. However, we did not give up. We, resorted to the EU Accompanying Measure Program, wrote another proposal to fund a meeting in which the State of Art regarding the BFT different aspects will be told, experience of BFT farming around the world will be discussed and foundations for RTD proposals will be initiated. The proposal was accepted. We have formed a Steering Committee, which met 3 times (first to prepare the proposal, second to prepare the meeting and third, 3 weeks ago, to finalize the program of the Conference, and solve all the small problems that always crop up in the preparation of meetings like this one). We also spent many hours on the email exchanging ideas, written parts of the proposal and the conference to follow. The first Conference on the Domestication of the Blue Fin Tuna (DOTT) which was held in Cartagena, Spain, and which this volume is presenting most of the presentations offered during the 5 days meeting, should be considered as a successful event. I, for one, am very happy with the conference itself and the outcome. We have been informed on most BFT activities around the world; state of the wild populations, BFT fisheries and landings, BFT fattening operations in different parts of the world such as Japan, Australia, Mexico, Malta, Croatia and Spain. There were very enlighten session on many of the BFT biological traits such as reproduction, larval rearing, nutrition, as well as behavioral and straddling aspects of this species. Most of the reports where given by people who have had direct experience in dealing with the BFT, however, many presentations had theoretical components in them. Following the plenary sessions, which lasted two and a half days, the participants were divided into workshops, which dealt with a few major disciplines concerning the domestication of the BFT. Most of the workshops lasted for two sessions of a few hours each. The ultimate goal of the workshop was to come up with a program and a skeleton for a research proposal to be submitted to the EU RTD Commission in Brussels. The first workshop was held still in the plenary forum and was devoted to the reproduction of the BFT. It was done as a demonstration and guideline to the other workshops, since a proposal in this field was submitted and approved by Brussels at the time. We had four workshops on the following subjects: 1. Socio-economics and environmental aspects of farming the BFT. 2. Larval and juvenile production of the BFT 3. Husbandry and nutrition of BFT farming 4. Engineering aspects of BFT farming. Short summaries of the above workshops can be found in the proceedings. The closing session of the conference was devoted to drawing a set of resolutions and adopting them by the plenary forum. These resolutions are aimed at increasing the awareness of the public, the different governments and the EU Community and its administration prospects of domestication the BFT and what it involves. The amended resolutions are attached to this chapter of the proceedings. We hope that the DOTT Conference has initiated a campaign, which will, eventually bring about the farming and restocking of the Bluefin Tuna. A worthwhile campaign, which will come to fruition in the next decade or two. On Behalf of the Steering Committee I want to thank a couple of funding institutions and a few key people that without their efforts and hard work this event would have stayed as an unrealised dream: The EU Commission for funding the DOTT conference, The Marine Policy Centre of Woods Hole Institution of Oceanography, Woods Hole, Mass., USA My colleagues, who became friends, on the Steering Committee: Antonio Garcia and, the Spanish National Coordinator and Fernando de la Gandara both from IEO, Mazarron, without whom this meeting could not have happened. Prof. Christopher Bridges from the Univ. of Düsseldorf, who tirelessly was my anchor to sanity all along the last two and a half years. Prof. Gregorio DeMetrio from the Univ. of Bari who hosted the first meeting of the, would be, Steering Committee in 1999. Prof. Joaquin Roca, from the hosting Polytechnic Univ. of Cartagena who put a lot of effort into realizing the meeting. Drs. Antonio Medina and Gabriel Mourente from the Univ. of Cadiz who were the first recruits to the DOTT crusade ever since 1998. Gines Mendez, Atunes de Mazarron, the President of ASETUN, who hosted us and encouraged our activities all along. François Rene and Christian Fauvel from IFREMER, Palavas, France, who tirelessly helped in ideas, lobbying and organization on the French side of the border. Zarko Peric from Malta who came late to the Steering committee but contributed a lot to our rational. Dr. Constantinos Mylonas from IMBC, Crete, Greece who came on board strong and creative and last but not least, David De Monbrison from CEASM, Paris, France, who all along pointed out the political, social, economics and environmental issues involved it the DOTT. Our host, the Polytechnic Univ. of Cartagena and its president Prof. Juan Ramón Medina Precioso, and the vice President Prof. Antonio Garcia Sánchez. Antonio Belmonte who arranged all details of the visits to the farms and packing plants And to Isabel Belizon from ESLABON who helped organized the Meeting Many other people who lent a supportive hand during the long period of preparation for the meeting, which the space is too small to mention them all. Hillel Gordin DOTT Coordinator May 2002European Union – FP5 Quality of Life Program, Instituto Español de Oceanografía (IEO), Universidad Politecnica Cartagena, Institut Français de Recherche pour l ´Exploitation de la Mer (IFREMER), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Asociación de Empresarios de Túnidos de la Región de Murcia (ASETUN), Centre International de Hautes Etudes Agronomiques Méditerranéennes (CIHEAM) Asamblea Regional de Murcia, Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Cartagena, Concejalia de la Mujer

The Good Times, May 29, 1975

Vol. 3, No. 30, 8 pageshttps://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/student_newspaper/2032/thumbnail.jp