Joint Modeling of Content and Discourse Relations in Dialogues

We present a joint modeling approach to identify salient discussion points in spoken meetings as well as to label the discourse relations between speaker turns. A variation of our model is also discussed when discourse relations are treated as latent variables. Experimental results on two popular meeting corpora show that our joint model can outperform state-of-the-art approaches for both phrase-based content selection and discourse relation prediction tasks. We also evaluate our model on predicting the consistency among team members' understanding of their group decisions. Classifiers trained with features constructed from our model achieve significant better predictive performance than the state-of-the-art.Comment: Accepted by ACL 2017. 11 page

Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies

Speech media, that is, digital audio and video containing spoken content, has blossomed in recent years. Large collections are accruing on the Internet as well as in private and enterprise settings. This growth has motivated extensive research on techniques and technologies that facilitate reliable indexing and retrieval. Spoken content retrieval (SCR) requires the combination of audio and speech processing technologies with methods from information retrieval (IR). SCR research initially investigated planned speech structured in document-like units, but has subsequently shifted focus to more informal spoken content produced spontaneously, outside of the studio and in conversational settings. This survey provides an overview of the field of SCR encompassing component technologies, the relationship of SCR to text IR and automatic speech recognition and user interaction issues. It is aimed at researchers with backgrounds in speech technology or IR who are seeking deeper insight on how these fields are integrated to support research and development, thus addressing the core challenges of SCR

Англійська мова для навчання і работи. Навчальний посібник з англійської мови за професійним спрямуванням для студентів і фахівців галузі знань 0503 Розробка корисних копалин Т 1

A coursebook includes all the activities of students’ work at ESP course aimed at development of language behaviour necessary for effective communication of students in their study and specialism areas. The tasks and activities given in the coursebook are typicalfor students’ academic and professional domains and situations. The content is organized in modules that covers generic job-related language skills of engineers. The authentic texts taken from real life contain interesting up-to-date information about mining, peculiarities of study abroad, customs and traditions of English-speaking countries. Pack of self-study resources given in Part II contains Glossary of mining terms, tasks and activities aimed at developing a range of vocabulary necessary for mining, different functions and functional exponents to be used in academic and professional environment as well as tasks developing self-awareness, self-assessment and self-organisation skills. Testing points for different grammar structuresare given in Part III. Indices at the end of each part easify the use of the coursebook. The coursebook contains illustrations, various samples of visualizing technical information. The coursebook is designed for ESP students of non-linguistic universities. It can be used as teaching/learning materials for ESP Courses for Mining Engineers as well as for self-study of subject and specialist teachers, practicing mining engineers and researchers in Engineering.У посібнику представлені всі види діяльності студентів з вивчення англійської мови, спрямовані на розвиток мовної поведінки, необхідної для ефективного спілкування в академічному та професійному середовищах. Навчальний посібник містить завдання і вправи, типові для різноманітних академічних та професійних сфер і ситуацій. Структура організації змісту– модульна і охоплює загальні мовленнєві вміння інженерів. Зразки текстів– автентичні, взяті з реального життя, містять цікаву та актуальну інформацію про видобувничу промисловість, особливості навчання за кордоном, традиції та звичаї країн, мова яких вивчається. Ресурси для самостійної роботи(Том ІІ) містять глосарій термінів, завдання та вправи для розвитку словарного запасу та розширення діапазону функціональних зразків, необхідних для виконання певних функцій, та завдання, які спрямовані на розвиток навичок самооцінювання і організації свого навчання. Граматичні явища і вправи для їх засвоєння наводяться в томі ІІІ. Наприкінці кожної частини наведено алфавітно-предметні покажчики. Багато ілюстрацій та різних візуальних засобів подання інформації. Навчальний посібник призначений для студентів технічних університетів гірничого профілю. Може використовуватися для самостійного вивчення англійської мови викладачами, фахівцями і науковцями різних інженерних галузей

Web Conference Summarization Through a System of Flags

In today’s world, we are always trying to find new ways to advance. This era has given rise to a global, distributed workforce since technology has allowed people to access and communicate with individuals all over the world. With the rise of remote workers, the need for quality communication tools has risen significantly. These communication tools come in many forms, and web-conference apps are among the most prominent for the task. Developing a system to automatically summarize the web-conference will save companies time and money, leading to more efficient meetings. Current approaches to summarizing multi-speaker web-conferences tend to yield poor or incoherent results, since conversations do not flow in the same manner that monologues or well-structured articles do. This thesis proposes a system of flags used to extract information from sentences, where the flags are fed into Machine Learning models to determine the importance of the the sentence with which they are associated. The system of flags shows promise for multi-speaker conference summaries

Strategies for Change: Research Initiatives and Recommendations to Improve Police-Community Relations in Oakland, CA

New Stanford research on thousands of police interactions found significant racial differences in Oakland, Calif., police conduct toward African Americans in traffic and pedestrian stops, while offering a big data approach to improving police-community relationships there and elsewhere.The report makes 50 specific recommendations for police agencies to consider, such as more expansive data collection and more focused efforts to change the nature of mindsets, policies and systems in law enforcement that contribute to racial disparities.Among the findings, African American men were four times more likely to be searched than whites during a traffic stop. African Americans were also more likely to be handcuffed, even if they ultimately were not arrested.Across the United States, the report noted, police agencies are guided by the commitment to serve communities with fairness, respect and honor. Yet tensions between police and communities of color are documented to be at an all-time high