113,735 research outputs found
Producing power-law distributions and damping word frequencies with two-stage language models
Standard statistical models of language fail to capture one of the most striking properties of natural languages: the power-law distribution in the frequencies of word tokens. We present a framework for developing statisticalmodels that can generically produce power laws, breaking generativemodels into two stages. The first stage, the generator, can be any standard probabilistic model, while the second stage, the adaptor, transforms the word frequencies of this model to provide a closer match to natural language. We show that two commonly used Bayesian models, the Dirichlet-multinomial model and the Dirichlet process, can be viewed as special cases of our framework. We discuss two stochastic processes-the Chinese restaurant process and its two-parameter generalization based on the Pitman-Yor process-that can be used as adaptors in our framework to produce power-law distributions over word frequencies. We show that these adaptors justify common estimation procedures based on logarithmic or inverse-power transformations of empirical frequencies. In addition, taking the Pitman-Yor Chinese restaurant process as an adaptor justifies the appearance of type frequencies in formal analyses of natural language and improves the performance of a model for unsupervised learning of morphology.48 page(s
The Unsupervised Acquisition of a Lexicon from Continuous Speech
We present an unsupervised learning algorithm that acquires a
natural-language lexicon from raw speech. The algorithm is based on the optimal
encoding of symbol sequences in an MDL framework, and uses a hierarchical
representation of language that overcomes many of the problems that have
stymied previous grammar-induction procedures. The forward mapping from symbol
sequences to the speech stream is modeled using features based on articulatory
gestures. We present results on the acquisition of lexicons and language models
from raw speech, text, and phonetic transcripts, and demonstrate that our
algorithm compares very favorably to other reported results with respect to
segmentation performance and statistical efficiency.Comment: 27 page technical repor
Visual Affect Around the World: A Large-scale Multilingual Visual Sentiment Ontology
Every culture and language is unique. Our work expressly focuses on the
uniqueness of culture and language in relation to human affect, specifically
sentiment and emotion semantics, and how they manifest in social multimedia. We
develop sets of sentiment- and emotion-polarized visual concepts by adapting
semantic structures called adjective-noun pairs, originally introduced by Borth
et al. (2013), but in a multilingual context. We propose a new
language-dependent method for automatic discovery of these adjective-noun
constructs. We show how this pipeline can be applied on a social multimedia
platform for the creation of a large-scale multilingual visual sentiment
concept ontology (MVSO). Unlike the flat structure in Borth et al. (2013), our
unified ontology is organized hierarchically by multilingual clusters of
visually detectable nouns and subclusters of emotionally biased versions of
these nouns. In addition, we present an image-based prediction task to show how
generalizable language-specific models are in a multilingual context. A new,
publicly available dataset of >15.6K sentiment-biased visual concepts across 12
languages with language-specific detector banks, >7.36M images and their
metadata is also released.Comment: 11 pages, to appear at ACM MM'1
Speaker segmentation and clustering
This survey focuses on two challenging speech processing topics, namely: speaker segmentation and speaker clustering. Speaker segmentation aims at finding speaker change points in an audio stream, whereas speaker clustering aims at grouping speech segments based on speaker characteristics. Model-based, metric-based, and hybrid speaker segmentation algorithms are reviewed. Concerning speaker clustering, deterministic and probabilistic algorithms are examined. A comparative assessment of the reviewed algorithms is undertaken, the algorithm advantages and disadvantages are indicated, insight to the algorithms is offered, and deductions as well as recommendations are given. Rich transcription and movie analysis are candidate applications that benefit from combined speaker segmentation and clustering. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
A sticky HDP-HMM with application to speaker diarization
We consider the problem of speaker diarization, the problem of segmenting an
audio recording of a meeting into temporal segments corresponding to individual
speakers. The problem is rendered particularly difficult by the fact that we
are not allowed to assume knowledge of the number of people participating in
the meeting. To address this problem, we take a Bayesian nonparametric approach
to speaker diarization that builds on the hierarchical Dirichlet process hidden
Markov model (HDP-HMM) of Teh et al. [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 101 (2006)
1566--1581]. Although the basic HDP-HMM tends to over-segment the audio
data---creating redundant states and rapidly switching among them---we describe
an augmented HDP-HMM that provides effective control over the switching rate.
We also show that this augmentation makes it possible to treat emission
distributions nonparametrically. To scale the resulting architecture to
realistic diarization problems, we develop a sampling algorithm that employs a
truncated approximation of the Dirichlet process to jointly resample the full
state sequence, greatly improving mixing rates. Working with a benchmark NIST
data set, we show that our Bayesian nonparametric architecture yields
state-of-the-art speaker diarization results.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS395 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Learning and Production of Movement Sequences: Behavioral, Neurophysiological, and Modeling Perspectives
A growing wave of behavioral studies, using a wide variety of paradigms that were introduced or greatly refined in recent years, has generated a new wealth of parametric observations about serial order behavior. What was a mere trickle of neurophysiological studies has grown to a more steady stream of probes of neural sites and mechanisms underlying sequential behavior. Moreover, simulation models of serial behavior generation have begun to open a channel to link cellular dynamics with cognitive and behavioral dynamics. Here we summarize the major results from prominent sequence learning and performance tasks, namely immediate serial recall, typing, 2XN, discrete sequence production, and serial reaction time. These populate a continuum from higher to lower degrees of internal control of sequential organization. The main movement classes covered are speech and keypressing, both involving small amplitude movements that are very amenable to parametric study. A brief synopsis of classes of serial order models, vis-à-vis the detailing of major effects found in the behavioral data, leads to a focus on competitive queuing (CQ) models. Recently, the many behavioral predictive successes of CQ models have been joined by successful prediction of distinctively patterend electrophysiological recordings in prefrontal cortex, wherein parallel activation dynamics of multiple neural ensembles strikingly matches the parallel dynamics predicted by CQ theory. An extended CQ simulation model-the N-STREAMS neural network model-is then examined to highlight issues in ongoing attemptes to accomodate a broader range of behavioral and neurophysiological data within a CQ-consistent theory. Important contemporary issues such as the nature of working memory representations for sequential behavior, and the development and role of chunks in hierarchial control are prominent throughout.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency/Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409); National Institute of Mental Health (R01 DC02852
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