Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech

We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as Statement, Question, Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue model is based on treating the discourse structure of a conversation as a hidden Markov model and the individual dialogue acts as observations emanating from the model states. Constraints on the likely sequence of dialogue acts are modeled via a dialogue act n-gram. The statistical dialogue grammar is combined with word n-grams, decision trees, and neural networks modeling the idiosyncratic lexical and prosodic manifestations of each dialogue act. We develop a probabilistic integration of speech recognition with dialogue modeling, to improve both speech recognition and dialogue act classification accuracy. Models are trained and evaluated using a large hand-labeled database of 1,155 conversations from the Switchboard corpus of spontaneous human-to-human telephone speech. We achieved good dialogue act labeling accuracy (65% based on errorful, automatically recognized words and prosody, and 71% based on word transcripts, compared to a chance baseline accuracy of 35% and human accuracy of 84%) and a small reduction in word recognition error.Comment: 35 pages, 5 figures. Changes in copy editing (note title spelling changed

Международная научная конференция "Робастная статистика и финансовая математика - 2019" (04-06 июля 2019 г.) : сборник статей

В сборнике представлены статьи, посвященные актуальным проблемам математической статистики и финансовой математики, а также современным подходам и методам решения фундаментальных и прикладных задач. Для студентов, аспирантов, специалистов в области математической статистики и ее приложений.Текст кн.: рус., англ

Bayesian system identification of a nonlinear dynamical system using a novel variant of Simulated Annealing

This work details the Bayesian identification of a nonlinear dynamical system using a novel MCMC algorithm: 'Data Annealing'. Data Annealing is similar to Simulated Annealing in that it allows the Markov chain to easily clear 'local traps' in the target distribution. To achieve this, training data is fed into the likelihood such that its influence over the posterior is introduced gradually - this allows the annealing procedure to be conducted with reduced computational expense. Additionally, Data Annealing uses a proposal distribution which allows it to conduct a local search accompanied by occasional long jumps, reducing the chance that it will become stuck in local traps. Here it is used to identify an experimental nonlinear system. The resulting Markov chains are used to approximate the covariance matrices of the parameters in a set of competing models before the issue of model selection is tackled using the Deviance Information Criterion. © 2014

Distributed Detection and Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this article we consider the problems of distributed detection and estimation in wireless sensor networks. In the first part, we provide a general framework aimed to show how an efficient design of a sensor network requires a joint organization of in-network processing and communication. Then, we recall the basic features of consensus algorithm, which is a basic tool to reach globally optimal decisions through a distributed approach. The main part of the paper starts addressing the distributed estimation problem. We show first an entirely decentralized approach, where observations and estimations are performed without the intervention of a fusion center. Then, we consider the case where the estimation is performed at a fusion center, showing how to allocate quantization bits and transmit powers in the links between the nodes and the fusion center, in order to accommodate the requirement on the maximum estimation variance, under a constraint on the global transmit power. We extend the approach to the detection problem. Also in this case, we consider the distributed approach, where every node can achieve a globally optimal decision, and the case where the decision is taken at a central node. In the latter case, we show how to allocate coding bits and transmit power in order to maximize the detection probability, under constraints on the false alarm rate and the global transmit power. Then, we generalize consensus algorithms illustrating a distributed procedure that converges to the projection of the observation vector onto a signal subspace. We then address the issue of energy consumption in sensor networks, thus showing how to optimize the network topology in order to minimize the energy necessary to achieve a global consensus. Finally, we address the problem of matching the topology of the network to the graph describing the statistical dependencies among the observed variables.Comment: 92 pages, 24 figures. To appear in E-Reference Signal Processing, R. Chellapa and S. Theodoridis, Eds., Elsevier, 201

Duality for nonlinear filtering

This thesis is concerned with the stochastic filtering problem for a hidden Markov model (HMM) with the white noise observation model. For this filtering problem, we make three types of original contributions: (1) dual controllability characterization of stochastic observability, (2) dual minimum variance optimal control formulation of the stochastic filtering problem, and (3) filter stability analysis using the dual optimal control formulation. For the first contribution of this thesis, a backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE) is proposed as the dual control system. The observability (detectability) of the HMM is shown to be equivalent to the controllability (stabilizability) of the dual control system. For the linear-Gaussian model, the dual relationship reduces to classical duality in linear systems theory. The second contribution is to transform the minimum variance estimation problem into an optimal control problem. The constraint is given by the dual control system. The optimal solution is obtained via two approaches: (1) by an application of maximum principle and (2) by the martingale characterization of the optimal value. The optimal solution is used to derive the nonlinear filter. The third contribution is to carry out filter stability analysis by studying the dual optimal control problem. Two approaches are presented through Chapters 7 and 8. In Chapter 7, conditional Poincar\'e inequality (PI) is introduced. Based on conditional PI, various convergence rates are obtained and related to literature. In Chapter 8, the stabilizability of the dual control system is shown to be a necessary and sufficient condition for filter stability on certain finite state space model.Comment: Ph.D. Thesis of the autho

Implementing Bayesian Inference with Neural Networks

Embodied agents, be they animals or robots, acquire information about the world through their senses. Embodied agents, however, do not simply lose this information once it passes by, but rather process and store it for future use. The most general theory of how an agent can combine stored knowledge with new observations is Bayesian inference. In this dissertation I present a theory of how embodied agents can learn to implement Bayesian inference with neural networks. By neural network I mean both artificial and biological neural networks, and in my dissertation I address both kinds. On one hand, I develop theory for implementing Bayesian inference in deep generative models, and I show how to train multilayer perceptrons to compute approximate predictions for Bayesian filtering. On the other hand, I show that several models in computational neuroscience are special cases of the general theory that I develop in this dissertation, and I use this theory to model and explain several phenomena in neuroscience. The key contributions of this dissertation can be summarized as follows: - I develop a class of graphical model called nth-order harmoniums. An nth-order harmonium is an n-tuple of random variables, where the conditional distribution of each variable given all the others is always an element of the same exponential family. I show that harmoniums have a recursive structure which allows them to be analyzed at coarser and finer levels of detail. - I define a class of harmoniums called rectified harmoniums, which are constrained to have priors which are conjugate to their posteriors. As a consequence of this, rectified harmoniums afford efficient sampling and learning. - I develop deep harmoniums, which are harmoniums which can be represented by hierarchical, undirected graphs. I develop the theory of rectification for deep harmoniums, and develop a novel algorithm for training deep generative models. - I show how to implement a variety of optimal and near-optimal Bayes filters by combining the solution to Bayes' rule provided by rectified harmoniums, with predictions computed by a recurrent neural network. I then show how to train a neural network to implement Bayesian filtering when the transition and emission distributions are unknown. - I show how some well-established models of neural activity are special cases of the theory I present in this dissertation, and how these models can be generalized with the theory of rectification. - I show how the theory that I present can model several neural phenomena including proprioception and gain-field modulation of tuning curves. - I introduce a library for the programming language Haskell, within which I have implemented all the simulations presented in this dissertation. This library uses concepts from Riemannian geometry to provide a rigorous and efficient environment for implementing complex numerical simulations. I also use the results presented in this dissertation to argue for the fundamental role of neural computation in embodied cognition. I argue, in other words, that before we will be able to build truly intelligent robots, we will need to truly understand biological brains

Predicting Flavonoid UGT Regioselectivity with Graphical Residue Models and Machine Learning.

Machine learning is applied to a challenging and biologically significant protein classification problem: the prediction of flavonoid UGT acceptor regioselectivity from primary protein sequence. Novel indices characterizing graphical models of protein residues are introduced. The indices are compared with existing amino acid indices and found to cluster residues appropriately. A variety of models employing the indices are then investigated by examining their performance when analyzed using nearest neighbor, support vector machine, and Bayesian neural network classifiers. Improvements over nearest neighbor classifications relying on standard alignment similarity scores are reported