A Comparison of Decision Tree Classifiers for Automatic Diagnosis of Speech Recognition Errors

Present speech recognition systems are becoming more complex due to technology advances, optimizations and special requirements such as small computation and memory footprints. Proper handling of system failures can be seen as a kind of fault diagnosis. Motivated by the success of decision tree diagnosis in other scientific fields and by their successful application in speech recognition in the last decade, we contribute to the topic mainly in terms of comparison of different types of decision trees. Five styles are examined: CART (testing three different splitting criteria), C4.5, and then Minimum Message Length (MML), strict MML and Bayesian styles decision trees. We apply these techniques to data of computer speech recognition fed by intrinsically variable speech. We conclude that for this task, CART technique outperforms C4.5 in terms of better classification for ASR failures

Multimodal Data Analysis of Dyadic Interactions for an Automated Feedback System Supporting Parent Implementation of Pivotal Response Treatment

abstract: Parents fulfill a pivotal role in early childhood development of social and communication skills. In children with autism, the development of these skills can be delayed. Applied behavioral analysis (ABA) techniques have been created to aid in skill acquisition. Among these, pivotal response treatment (PRT) has been empirically shown to foster improvements. Research into PRT implementation has also shown that parents can be trained to be effective interventionists for their children. The current difficulty in PRT training is how to disseminate training to parents who need it, and how to support and motivate practitioners after training. Evaluation of the parents’ fidelity to implementation is often undertaken using video probes that depict the dyadic interaction occurring between the parent and the child during PRT sessions. These videos are time consuming for clinicians to process, and often result in only minimal feedback for the parents. Current trends in technology could be utilized to alleviate the manual cost of extracting data from the videos, affording greater opportunities for providing clinician created feedback as well as automated assessments. The naturalistic context of the video probes along with the dependence on ubiquitous recording devices creates a difficult scenario for classification tasks. The domain of the PRT video probes can be expected to have high levels of both aleatory and epistemic uncertainty. Addressing these challenges requires examination of the multimodal data along with implementation and evaluation of classification algorithms. This is explored through the use of a new dataset of PRT videos. The relationship between the parent and the clinician is important. The clinician can provide support and help build self-efficacy in addition to providing knowledge and modeling of treatment procedures. Facilitating this relationship along with automated feedback not only provides the opportunity to present expert feedback to the parent, but also allows the clinician to aid in personalizing the classification models. By utilizing a human-in-the-loop framework, clinicians can aid in addressing the uncertainty in the classification models by providing additional labeled samples. This will allow the system to improve classification and provides a person-centered approach to extracting multimodal data from PRT video probes.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Support vector machine based classification in condition monitoring of induction motors

Continuous and trouble-free operation of induction motors is an essential part of modern power and production plants. Faults and failures of electrical machinery may cause remarkable economical losses but also highly dangerous situations. In addition to analytical and knowledge-based models, application of data-based models has established a firm position in the induction motor fault diagnostics during the last decade. For example, pattern recognition with Neural Networks (NN) is widely studied. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a novel machine learning method introduced in early 90's. It is based on the statistical learning theory presented by V.N. Vapnik, and it has been successfully applied to numerous classification and pattern recognition problems such as text categorization, image recognition and bioinformatics. SVM based classifier is built to minimize the structural misclassification risk, whereas conventional classification techniques often apply minimization of the empirical risk. Therefore, SVM is claimed to lead enhanced generalisation properties. Further, application of SVM results in the global solution for a classification problem. Thirdly, SVM based classification is attractive, because its efficiency does not directly depend on the dimension of classified entities. This property is very useful in fault diagnostics, because the number of fault classification features does not have to be drastically limited. However, SVM has not yet been widely studied in the area of fault diagnostics. Specifically, in the condition monitoring of induction motor, it does not seem to have been considered before this research. In this thesis, a SVM based classification scheme is designed for different tasks in induction motor fault diagnostics and for partial discharge analysis of insulation condition monitoring. Several variables are compared as fault indicators, and forces on rotor are found to be important in fault detection instead of motor current that is currently widely studied. The measurement of forces is difficult, but easily measurable vibrations are directly related to the forces. Hence, vibration monitoring is considered in more detail as the medium for the motor fault diagnostics. SVM classifiers are essentially 2-class classifiers. In addition to the induction motor fault diagnostics, the results of this thesis cover various methods for coupling SVMs for carrying out a multi-class classification problem.reviewe

Words in Action: retrieval errors in aphasia, a topic for therapy

An aphasia is defined as an acquired impairment of language based on brain damage (Benson & Ardila 1996). All modes of language use may be involved: spontaneous speech, writing and comprehension of written and spoken language. Therefore, aphasia is labelled as a supramodal language disorder. The nature and severity of the disorder in each language mode may vruy between and within individual patients