5,160 research outputs found
The Block Point Process Model for Continuous-Time Event-Based Dynamic Networks
We consider the problem of analyzing timestamped relational events between a
set of entities, such as messages between users of an on-line social network.
Such data are often analyzed using static or discrete-time network models,
which discard a significant amount of information by aggregating events over
time to form network snapshots. In this paper, we introduce a block point
process model (BPPM) for continuous-time event-based dynamic networks. The BPPM
is inspired by the well-known stochastic block model (SBM) for static networks.
We show that networks generated by the BPPM follow an SBM in the limit of a
growing number of nodes. We use this property to develop principled and
efficient local search and variational inference procedures initialized by
regularized spectral clustering. We fit BPPMs with exponential Hawkes processes
to analyze several real network data sets, including a Facebook wall post
network with over 3,500 nodes and 130,000 events.Comment: To appear at The Web Conference 201
Prosody-Based Automatic Segmentation of Speech into Sentences and Topics
A crucial step in processing speech audio data for information extraction,
topic detection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and
topic units. Speech segmentation is challenging, since the cues typically
present for segmenting text (headers, paragraphs, punctuation) are absent in
spoken language. We investigate the use of prosody (information gleaned from
the timing and melody of speech) for these tasks. Using decision tree and
hidden Markov modeling techniques, we combine prosodic cues with word-based
approaches, and evaluate performance on two speech corpora, Broadcast News and
Switchboard. Results show that the prosodic model alone performs on par with,
or better than, word-based statistical language models -- for both true and
automatically recognized words in news speech. The prosodic model achieves
comparable performance with significantly less training data, and requires no
hand-labeling of prosodic events. Across tasks and corpora, we obtain a
significant improvement over word-only models using a probabilistic combination
of prosodic and lexical information. Inspection reveals that the prosodic
models capture language-independent boundary indicators described in the
literature. Finally, cue usage is task and corpus dependent. For example, pause
and pitch features are highly informative for segmenting news speech, whereas
pause, duration and word-based cues dominate for natural conversation.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures. To appear in Speech Communication 32(1-2),
Special Issue on Accessing Information in Spoken Audio, September 200
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