23 research outputs found
Joint Learning of Correlated Sequence Labelling Tasks Using Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks
The stream of words produced by Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems is
typically devoid of punctuations and formatting. Most natural language
processing applications expect segmented and well-formatted texts as input,
which is not available in ASR output. This paper proposes a novel technique of
jointly modeling multiple correlated tasks such as punctuation and
capitalization using bidirectional recurrent neural networks, which leads to
improved performance for each of these tasks. This method could be extended for
joint modeling of any other correlated sequence labeling tasks.Comment: Accepted in Interspeech 201
Speech Processing Approach for Diagnosing Dementia in an Early Stage
The clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias is very challenging, especially in the early stages. Our hypothesis is that any disease that affects particular brain regions involved in speech production and processing will also leave detectable finger prints in the speech. Computerized analysis of speech signals and computational linguistics have progressed to the point where an automatic speech analysis system is a promising approach for a low-cost non-invasive diagnostic tool for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease.We present empirical evidence that strong discrimination between subjects with a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer’s versus matched normal controls can be achieved with a combination of acoustic features from speech, linguistic features extracted from an automatically determined transcription of the speech including punctuation, and results of a mini mental state exam (MMSE). We also show that discrimination is nearly as strong even if the MMSE is not used, which implies that a fully automated system is feasible. Since commercial automatic speech recognition (ASR) tools were unable to provide transcripts for about half of our speech samples, a customized ASR system was developed