A Framework for Bioacoustic Vocalization Analysis Using Hidden Markov Models

Using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) as a recognition framework for automatic classification of animal vocalizations has a number of benefits, including the ability to handle duration variability through nonlinear time alignment, the ability to incorporate complex language or recognition constraints, and easy extendibility to continuous recognition and detection domains. In this work, we apply HMMs to several different species and bioacoustic tasks using generalized spectral features that can be easily adjusted across species and HMM network topologies suited to each task. This experimental work includes a simple call type classification task using one HMM per vocalization for repertoire analysis of Asian elephants, a language-constrained song recognition task using syllable models as base units for ortolan bunting vocalizations, and a stress stimulus differentiation task in poultry vocalizations using a non-sequential model via a one-state HMM with Gaussian mixtures. Results show strong performance across all tasks and illustrate the flexibility of the HMM framework for a variety of species, vocalization types, and analysis tasks

A Generative Model of Words and Relationships from Multiple Sources

Neural language models are a powerful tool to embed words into semantic vector spaces. However, learning such models generally relies on the availability of abundant and diverse training examples. In highly specialised domains this requirement may not be met due to difficulties in obtaining a large corpus, or the limited range of expression in average use. Such domains may encode prior knowledge about entities in a knowledge base or ontology. We propose a generative model which integrates evidence from diverse data sources, enabling the sharing of semantic information. We achieve this by generalising the concept of co-occurrence from distributional semantics to include other relationships between entities or words, which we model as affine transformations on the embedding space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by outperforming recent models on a link prediction task and demonstrating its ability to profit from partially or fully unobserved data training labels. We further demonstrate the usefulness of learning from different data sources with overlapping vocabularies.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures; incorporated feedback from reviewers; to appear in Proceedings of the Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 201

Discovery of Linguistic Relations Using Lexical Attraction

This work has been motivated by two long term goals: to understand how humans learn language and to build programs that can understand language. Using a representation that makes the relevant features explicit is a prerequisite for successful learning and understanding. Therefore, I chose to represent relations between individual words explicitly in my model. Lexical attraction is defined as the likelihood of such relations. I introduce a new class of probabilistic language models named lexical attraction models which can represent long distance relations between words and I formalize this new class of models using information theory. Within the framework of lexical attraction, I developed an unsupervised language acquisition program that learns to identify linguistic relations in a given sentence. The only explicitly represented linguistic knowledge in the program is lexical attraction. There is no initial grammar or lexicon built in and the only input is raw text. Learning and processing are interdigitated. The processor uses the regularities detected by the learner to impose structure on the input. This structure enables the learner to detect higher level regularities. Using this bootstrapping procedure, the program was trained on 100 million words of Associated Press material and was able to achieve 60% precision and 50% recall in finding relations between content-words. Using knowledge of lexical attraction, the program can identify the correct relations in syntactically ambiguous sentences such as ``I saw the Statue of Liberty flying over New York.''Comment: dissertation, 56 page

Pattern Recognition for Command and Control Data Systems

To analyze real-world events, researchers collect observation data from an underlying process and construct models to represent the observed situation. In this work, we consider issues that affect the construction and usage of a specific type of model. Markov models are commonly used because their combination of discrete states and stochastic transitions is suited to applications with both deterministic and stochastic components. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are a class of Markov model commonly used in pattern recognition. We first demonstrate how to construct HMMs using only the observation data, and no a priori information, by extending a previously developed approach from J.P. Crutchfield and C.R. Shalizi. We also show how to determine with a level of statistical confidence whether or not the model fully encapsulates the underlying process. Once models are constructed from observation data, the models are used to identify other types of observations. Traditional approaches consider the maximum likelihood that the model matches the observation, solving a classification problem. We present a new method using confidence intervals and receiver operating characteristic curves. Our method solves a detection problem by determining if observation data matches zero, one, or more than one model. To detect the occurrence of a behavior in observation data, one must consider the amount of data required. We consider behaviors to be \u27serial Markovian,\u27 when the behavior can change from one model to another at any time. When analyzing observation data, considering too much data induces high delay and could lead to confusion in the system if multiple behaviors are observed in the data stream. If too little data is used, the system has a high false positive rate and is unable to correctly detect behaviors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of all methods using illustrative examples and consumer behavior data