327,819 research outputs found
Relating Objective and Subjective Performance Measures for AAM-based Visual Speech Synthesizers
We compare two approaches for synthesizing visual speech using Active Appearance Models (AAMs): one that utilizes acoustic features as input, and one that utilizes a phonetic transcription as input. Both synthesizers are trained using the same data and the performance is measured using both objective and subjective testing. We investigate the impact of likely sources of error in the synthesized visual speech by introducing typical errors into real visual speech sequences and subjectively measuring the perceived degradation. When only a small region (e.g. a single syllable) of ground-truth visual speech is incorrect we find that the subjective score for the entire sequence is subjectively lower than sequences generated by our synthesizers. This observation motivates further consideration of an often ignored issue, which is to what extent are subjective measures correlated with objective measures of performance? Significantly, we find that the most commonly used objective measures of performance are not necessarily the best indicator of viewer perception of quality. We empirically evaluate alternatives and show that the cost of a dynamic time warp of synthesized visual speech parameters to the respective ground-truth parameters is a better indicator of subjective quality
Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation
This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language
Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from
non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the
field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new
(usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology.
This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on
the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are
organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that
have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas
of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG
evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural
Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the
relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118
pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl
Streaming Video QoE Modeling and Prediction: A Long Short-Term Memory Approach
HTTP based adaptive video streaming has become a popular choice of streaming
due to the reliable transmission and the flexibility offered to adapt to
varying network conditions. However, due to rate adaptation in adaptive
streaming, the quality of the videos at the client keeps varying with time
depending on the end-to-end network conditions. Further, varying network
conditions can lead to the video client running out of playback content
resulting in rebuffering events. These factors affect the user satisfaction and
cause degradation of the user quality of experience (QoE). It is important to
quantify the perceptual QoE of the streaming video users and monitor the same
in a continuous manner so that the QoE degradation can be minimized. However,
the continuous evaluation of QoE is challenging as it is determined by complex
dynamic interactions among the QoE influencing factors. Towards this end, we
present LSTM-QoE, a recurrent neural network based QoE prediction model using a
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. The LSTM-QoE is a network of cascaded
LSTM blocks to capture the nonlinearities and the complex temporal dependencies
involved in the time varying QoE. Based on an evaluation over several publicly
available continuous QoE databases, we demonstrate that the LSTM-QoE has the
capability to model the QoE dynamics effectively. We compare the proposed model
with the state-of-the-art QoE prediction models and show that it provides
superior performance across these databases. Further, we discuss the state
space perspective for the LSTM-QoE and show the efficacy of the state space
modeling approaches for QoE prediction
Cognitive facilitation following intentional odor exposure
This paper reviews evidence that, in addition to incidental olfactory pollutants, intentional odor delivery can impact cognitive operations both positively and negatively. Evidence for cognitive facilitation/interference is reviewed alongside four potential explanations for odor-induced effects. It is concluded that the pharmacological properties of odors can induce changes in cognition. However, these effects can be accentuated/attenuated by the shift in mood following odor exposure, expectancy of cognitive effects, and cues to behavior via the contextual association with the odor. It is proposed that greater consideration is required in the intentional utilization of odors within both industrial and private locations, since differential effects are observed for odors with positive hedonic qualities
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