Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda

Recorded interviews form a rich basis for scholarly inquiry. Examples include oral histories, community memory projects, and interviews conducted for broadcast media. Emerging technologies offer the potential to radically transform the way in which recorded interviews are made accessible, but this vision will demand substantial investments from a broad range of research communities. This article reviews the present state of practice for making recorded interviews available and the state-of-the-art for key component technologies. A large number of important research issues are identified, and from that set of issues, a coherent research agenda is proposed

Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications

The Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions with Biomedical Applications (MAVEBA) workshop came into being in 1999 from the particularly felt need of sharing know-how, objectives and results between areas that until then seemed quite distinct such as bioengineering, medicine and singing. MAVEBA deals with all aspects concerning the study of the human voice with applications ranging from the neonate to the adult and elderly. Over the years the initial issues have grown and spread also in other aspects of research such as occupational voice disorders, neurology, rehabilitation, image and video analysis. MAVEBA takes place every two years always in Firenze, Italy

IberSPEECH 2020: XI Jornadas en Tecnología del Habla and VII Iberian SLTech

IberSPEECH2020 is a two-day event, bringing together the best researchers and practitioners in speech and language technologies in Iberian languages to promote interaction and discussion. The organizing committee has planned a wide variety of scientific and social activities, including technical paper presentations, keynote lectures, presentation of projects, laboratories activities, recent PhD thesis, discussion panels, a round table, and awards to the best thesis and papers. The program of IberSPEECH2020 includes a total of 32 contributions that will be presented distributed among 5 oral sessions, a PhD session, and a projects session. To ensure the quality of all the contributions, each submitted paper was reviewed by three members of the scientific review committee. All the papers in the conference will be accessible through the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Online Archive. Paper selection was based on the scores and comments provided by the scientific review committee, which includes 73 researchers from different institutions (mainly from Spain and Portugal, but also from France, Germany, Brazil, Iran, Greece, Hungary, Czech Republic, Ucrania, Slovenia). Furthermore, it is confirmed to publish an extension of selected papers as a special issue of the Journal of Applied Sciences, “IberSPEECH 2020: Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages”, published by MDPI with fully open access. In addition to regular paper sessions, the IberSPEECH2020 scientific program features the following activities: the ALBAYZIN evaluation challenge session.Red Española de Tecnologías del Habla. Universidad de Valladoli

Bag-of-words representations for computer audition

Computer audition is omnipresent in everyday life, in applications ranging from personalised virtual agents to health care. From a technical point of view, the goal is to robustly classify the content of an audio signal in terms of a defined set of labels, such as, e.g., the acoustic scene, a medical diagnosis, or, in the case of speech, what is said or how it is said. Typical approaches employ machine learning (ML), which means that task-specific models are trained by means of examples. Despite recent successes in neural network-based end-to-end learning, taking the raw audio signal as input, models relying on hand-crafted acoustic features are still superior in some domains, especially for tasks where data is scarce. One major issue is nevertheless that a sequence of acoustic low-level descriptors (LLDs) cannot be fed directly into many ML algorithms as they require a static and fixed-length input. Moreover, also for dynamic classifiers, compressing the information of the LLDs over a temporal block by summarising them can be beneficial. However, the type of instance-level representation has a fundamental impact on the performance of the model. In this thesis, the so-called bag-of-audio-words (BoAW) representation is investigated as an alternative to the standard approach of statistical functionals. BoAW is an unsupervised method of representation learning, inspired from the bag-of-words method in natural language processing, forming a histogram of the terms present in a document. The toolkit openXBOW is introduced, enabling systematic learning and optimisation of these feature representations, unified across arbitrary modalities of numeric or symbolic descriptors. A number of experiments on BoAW are presented and discussed, focussing on a large number of potential applications and corresponding databases, ranging from emotion recognition in speech to medical diagnosis. The evaluations include a comparison of different acoustic LLD sets and configurations of the BoAW generation process. The key findings are that BoAW features are a meaningful alternative to statistical functionals, offering certain benefits, while being able to preserve the advantages of functionals, such as data-independence. Furthermore, it is shown that both representations are complementary and their fusion improves the performance of a machine listening system.Maschinelles Hören ist im täglichen Leben allgegenwärtig, mit Anwendungen, die von personalisierten virtuellen Agenten bis hin zum Gesundheitswesen reichen. Aus technischer Sicht besteht das Ziel darin, den Inhalt eines Audiosignals hinsichtlich einer Auswahl definierter Labels robust zu klassifizieren. Die Labels beschreiben bspw. die akustische Umgebung der Aufnahme, eine medizinische Diagnose oder - im Falle von Sprache - was gesagt wird oder wie es gesagt wird. Übliche Ansätze hierzu verwenden maschinelles Lernen, d.h., es werden anwendungsspezifische Modelle anhand von Beispieldaten trainiert. Trotz jüngster Erfolge beim Ende-zu-Ende-Lernen mittels neuronaler Netze, in welchen das unverarbeitete Audiosignal als Eingabe benutzt wird, sind Modelle, die auf definierten akustischen Merkmalen basieren, in manchen Bereichen weiterhin überlegen. Dies gilt im Besonderen für Einsatzzwecke, für die nur wenige Daten vorhanden sind. Allerdings besteht dabei das Problem, dass Zeitfolgen von akustischen Deskriptoren in viele Algorithmen des maschinellen Lernens nicht direkt eingespeist werden können, da diese eine statische Eingabe fester Länge benötigen. Außerdem kann es auch für dynamische (zeitabhängige) Klassifikatoren vorteilhaft sein, die Deskriptoren über ein gewisses Zeitintervall zusammenzufassen. Jedoch hat die Art der Merkmalsdarstellung einen grundlegenden Einfluss auf die Leistungsfähigkeit des Modells. In der vorliegenden Dissertation wird der sogenannte Bag-of-Audio-Words-Ansatz (BoAW) als Alternative zum Standardansatz der statistischen Funktionale untersucht. BoAW ist eine Methode des unüberwachten Lernens von Merkmalsdarstellungen, die von der Bag-of-Words-Methode in der Computerlinguistik inspiriert wurde, bei der ein Textdokument als Histogramm der vorkommenden Wörter beschrieben wird. Das Toolkit openXBOW wird vorgestellt, welches systematisches Training und Optimierung dieser Merkmalsdarstellungen - vereinheitlicht für beliebige Modalitäten mit numerischen oder symbolischen Deskriptoren - erlaubt. Es werden einige Experimente zum BoAW-Ansatz durchgeführt und diskutiert, die sich auf eine große Zahl möglicher Anwendungen und entsprechende Datensätze beziehen, von der Emotionserkennung in gesprochener Sprache bis zur medizinischen Diagnostik. Die Auswertungen beinhalten einen Vergleich verschiedener akustischer Deskriptoren und Konfigurationen der BoAW-Methode. Die wichtigsten Erkenntnisse sind, dass BoAW-Merkmalsvektoren eine geeignete Alternative zu statistischen Funktionalen darstellen, gewisse Vorzüge bieten und gleichzeitig wichtige Eigenschaften der Funktionale, wie bspw. die Datenunabhängigkeit, erhalten können. Zudem wird gezeigt, dass beide Darstellungen komplementär sind und eine Fusionierung die Leistungsfähigkeit eines Systems des maschinellen Hörens verbessert

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018 : 10-12 December 2018, Torino

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges

A model for stylometric analysis of e-mails for recipient-based personalised writing

Trabajo de Fin de Grado en Doble Grado en Ingeniería Informática y Matemáticas, Facultad de Informática UCM, Departamento de Ingeniería del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Curso 2019/2020Hoy en día se envían más de 306 mil millones de correos electrónicos diarios tanto en el ámbito profesional como el personal. Sin embargo, a pesar de que el canal sea el mismo, nuestro estilo varía en función del destinatario del mensaje. La estilometría en correos electrónicos es un campo de estudio reciente que trata de parametrizar el estilo de escritura a través de métricas. La mayoría de las investigaciones en este campo se centran en la detección de spam o identificación y autenticación de la autoría de los mensajes. En este trabajo se plantea un nuevo enfoque: estudiar el estilo dependiendo del destinatario del correo electrónico. El avance en esta dirección permitiría personalizar los sistemas de redacción de correos electrónicos de manera que fueran capaces de generar mensajes distintos en función del destinatario. En este trabajo se desarrolla una herramienta de análisis estilométrico de correos electrónicos, para el servicio de Gmail, que permite extraer y calcular distintas métricas de los mensajes de un usuario. Dicho analizador de estilo cuenta con cuatro módulos (extracción, preprocesamiento, corrección tipográfica y medición de estilo) que abordan las distintas fases necesarias para obtener los descriptores de estilo de cada uno de los mensajes. Una vez se cuenta con los resultados al evaluar las distintas métricas sobre cada mensaje, se analizan. Para ello se hace uso de populares técnicas de aprendizaje automático como K-Medias, Análisis de Componentes Principales y Árboles de Decisión. El objetivo es extraer conclusiones que permitan proponer un modelo de análisis estilométrico de correos electrónicos para la redacción personalizada basada en el destinatario. En este análisis de datos se encuentran ocho métricas que distinguen mejor el estilo en función del receptor de la información. Por último, se presenta el diseño de un sistema que utiliza estas ocho métricas para redactar correos electrónicos distintos según el destinatario. Este modelo puede ser de utilidad para personalizar aquellos sistemas de generación de lenguaje natural en función del destinatario, o de la audiencia a la que va dirigida el texto.Nowadays, more than 306 billion e-mails are sent daily, both in the professional and personal scopes. However, despite the fact that the channel is the same, our style varies depending on the recipient of the message. Stylometry in e-mails is a recent field of study that tries to obtain the definition of writing style through metrics. Nevertheless, most research in this field focuses on spam detection or message author identification and authentication. In this work a new approach is proposed: to study the style depending on the recipient of the e-mail. Moving in this direction would allow us to personalise e-mail writing systems so that they are capable of generating different messages depending on the recipient. In this work we develop a tool for the stylometric analysis of e-mails, for the Gmail service, which allows us to extract and calculate different metrics from the messages of a user. This style analyser has four modules (extraction, preprocessing, typographic correction and style measuring) that deal with the different phases needed to obtain the style descriptors of each of the messages. Once we have the results of evaluating the different metrics on each message, we analyse them. To this end, we use popular machine learning techniques such as K-Means, Principal Component Analysis and Decision Trees. The objective is to draw conclusions that allow us to propose a model of stylometric analysis of e-mails for personalized writing based on the recipient. In this data analysis we find eight metrics that better distinguish style according to the receiver of the information. Finally, we present the design of a system that uses these eight metrics to write different e-mails according to the recipient. This model can be useful to personalise those natural language generation systems depending on the recipient, or on the audience to which the text is addressed.Depto. de Ingeniería de Software e Inteligencia Artificial (ISIA)Fac. de InformáticaTRUEunpu

Proceedings of the Eighth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CliC-it 2021

The eighth edition of the Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2021) was held at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca from 26th to 28th January 2022. After the edition of 2020, which was held in fully virtual mode due to the health emergency related to Covid-19, CLiC-it 2021 represented the first moment for the Italian research community of Computational Linguistics to meet in person after more than one year of full/partial lockdown