65,188 research outputs found

    Comparing Human and Machine Errors in Conversational Speech Transcription

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    Recent work in automatic recognition of conversational telephone speech (CTS) has achieved accuracy levels comparable to human transcribers, although there is some debate how to precisely quantify human performance on this task, using the NIST 2000 CTS evaluation set. This raises the question what systematic differences, if any, may be found differentiating human from machine transcription errors. In this paper we approach this question by comparing the output of our most accurate CTS recognition system to that of a standard speech transcription vendor pipeline. We find that the most frequent substitution, deletion and insertion error types of both outputs show a high degree of overlap. The only notable exception is that the automatic recognizer tends to confuse filled pauses ("uh") and backchannel acknowledgments ("uhhuh"). Humans tend not to make this error, presumably due to the distinctive and opposing pragmatic functions attached to these words. Furthermore, we quantify the correlation between human and machine errors at the speaker level, and investigate the effect of speaker overlap between training and test data. Finally, we report on an informal "Turing test" asking humans to discriminate between automatic and human transcription error cases

    Before Breaking Bad News: Relationships Among Topic, Reasons for Sharing, Messenger Concerns, and the Reluctance to Share the News

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    Messengers are reluctant to reveal bad news, and this reluctance can hamper effective communication. With this investigation, we explore linkages among the topic of the news, messengers’ reasons for sharing, messenger concerns about sharing, the locus of the news, and whether these variables associate systematically with messenger reluctance to share the news. Retrospective self-reports (n = 330) revealed that bad news occurred in reliable topic categories, which in turn related to reasons for sharing, how extreme the news was perceived to be, and the concerns messengers had before sharing the bad news. Messengers reported more reluctance to share the news when they were also the locus of the news than when they were not, and they felt reluctance was greater when the topic was seen as more extreme. Theoretical implications and limitations are discussed

    The Political War

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    Pity Abraham Lincoln. Everything that should have gone right for the Union cause in the spring of 1864 had, in just a few weeks, gone defiantly and disastrously wrong. For two years, the 16th president had toiled uphill against the secession of the Confederate states, against the incompetence of his luckless generals and against his howling critics from both sides of the congressional aisle. Finally, in the summer and fall of 1863, the course of the war had begun to turn his way. Two great victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg staggered the Confederates, and those were followed by a knockdown blow delivered at Chattanooga by the man who was fast becoming Lincoln’s favorite general, Ulysses S. Grant. “The signs look better,” Lincoln rejoiced, “Peace does not appear so distant as it did.” [excerpt

    How do the events leading up to the World War I and the war itself affect the protagonist Lt. Henry and the characters close to him in the novel “Farewell to Arms” ?

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    The aim of this extended essay is to state the effects of events taking place and changing life standarts of the main character Lt. Frederic Henry and people around him especially Catherine Barkley in WWI in the novel “Farewell to Arms”. In this essay the effects of war on main character, people who are in close relationship with him and friendships after the war are examined. There are various changes in people’s lives especially the main character himself before and after the war. The situations that the main character Lt. Henry encountered with his friends both in military service and civil life took my interest to write this essay. There are many problems that the main character faced during WWI such as starvation and death of a close friend but these are only the ones that happened when he was in The Italian Army. By depicting those negative situations Ernest Hemingway critisizes war. Interrelational and psychological breakdowns that the characters face are emphasized as a reality of war in this novel. The narrator does not directly express these destructions during WWI. Instead, the narrator communicates ideas via main character Lt. Frederic Henry’s observations and experiences of war. As a person with dual nationality born in the USA, these observations are expository and declared. Thus his experiences of these realities such as feeling of loss, pain and love during WWI are highlighted. During this war, his life considerably changes as he tries to pursuit his love and relocate in order to meet his beloved again but their distress does not end although they escape from Italy to Switzerland. In army, he also gains affinity to violence by hurting people. In this way the protagonist undergoes changes and his life differentiates as well, but is it possible to confront all the problems

    Epistemology extended

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    A common presupposition in epistemology is that the processes contributing to the generation of knowledge do not extend beyond the knower's skin. This paper challenges this presupposition. I adduce a novel kind case that causes trouble for a number of even the most promising accounts of knowledge in current literature (virtue epistemological and modal accounts), at least so long as the presupposition is in place. I then look at a couple of recent accounts of knowledge that drop the presupposition and expressly allow the relevant processes to extended beyond the knower's skin. While these accounts can handle the problem case, they encounter difficulties elsewhere: extension occurs too easily and so the accounts predict knowledge where they ought not. Finally, I offer a novel way of extending epistemology and argue that it can steer clear of the problems on both sides

    The Official Student Newspaper of UAS

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    Editorial / Whalesong Staff -- Alaska's Sweet New Cash Crop -- UAS In Brief -- Oratory: The Story of UAS -- Oratory: Finding Your Path / Wellness Q&A -- Title IX and UAS -- Blacklight Dodgeball / Food Sovereignty Friday -- Animal Soldiers -- "Get Out:" A Horror Film on Modern Racism -- Local Non-Profit MCAN helps mental health clients -- Calendar and Comics

    Prisoners of Men

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    Comprehensibility and the basic structures of dialogue

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    The study of what makes utterances difficult or easy to understand is one of the central topics of research in comprehension. It is both theoretically attractive and useful in practice. The more we know about difficulties in understanding the more we know about understanding. And the better we grasp typical problems of understanding in certain types of discourse and for certain recipients the better we can overcome these problems and the better we can advise people whose job it is to overcome such problems. It is therefore not surprising that comprehensibility has been the object of much reflection as far back as the days of classical rhetoric and that it is a center of lively interest in several present-day scientific disciplines, ranging from artificial intelligence and educational psychology to linguistics

    EMPOWERING THE STUDENTS THROUGH LISTENING DIARIES TO MOTIVATE THEM TO IMPROVE THEIR LISTENING ABILITY

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    Menyimak (listening) dalam bahasa asing tidak sesederhana menyimak dalam bahasa ibu. Ketidakberhasilan siswa menemukan cara yang tepat dalam menyimak membuat nilai untuk mata kuliah ini sering tidak maksimal akibatnya semangat untuk belajar listening menurun. Proses belajar mengajar yang hanya mengandalkan pada pertemuan di kelas dirasa kurang memberikan hasil yang maksimal. Kendala tidak hanya secara teknis namun juga terletak pada materi yang diberikan. Input yang diterima siswa terbatas pada materi yang diberikan oleh pengajar yang tidak selalu sesuai dengan tingkat penguasaan, kebutuhan, dan keinginan masing-masing pembelajar. Mereka cenderung bertindak sebagai penerima yang pasif dan kendali sepenuhnya ada pada pengajar. Situasi formal di kelas sering membuat siswa tertekan dan kurang dapat berkonsentrasi. Pemberian tugas yang berupa catatan harian menyimak (listening diaries) diharapkan mampu mendorong mereka untuk meningkatkan kemampuan menyimak mereka. Mereka akan berpengalaman mencari dan memilih materi yang sesuai dengan keinginan dan kebutuhan. Mereka juga mendapat kesempatan mendengarkan dan melihat pemakaian Bahasa Inggris di dalam kehidupan sehari-hari melalui berbagai teks yang autentik maupun non-autentik dengan situasi yang lebih santai. Selain itu listening diaries memungkinkan siswa memantau perkembangan kemampuan listening mereka sendiri
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