43,391 research outputs found
Text-based and Signal-based Prediction of Break Indices and Pause Durations
The relation between symbolic and signal features of prosodic
boundaries is experimentally studied using prediction methods.
Text-based break index prediction turns out to be fairly good,
but signal-based prediction and pause duration prediction perform worse. A possible reason is that random signal feature
variations, as usually produced by humans, are hard to predict
SCREEN: Learning a Flat Syntactic and Semantic Spoken Language Analysis Using Artificial Neural Networks
In this paper, we describe a so-called screening approach for learning robust
processing of spontaneously spoken language. A screening approach is a flat
analysis which uses shallow sequences of category representations for analyzing
an utterance at various syntactic, semantic and dialog levels. Rather than
using a deeply structured symbolic analysis, we use a flat connectionist
analysis. This screening approach aims at supporting speech and language
processing by using (1) data-driven learning and (2) robustness of
connectionist networks. In order to test this approach, we have developed the
SCREEN system which is based on this new robust, learned and flat analysis.
In this paper, we focus on a detailed description of SCREEN's architecture,
the flat syntactic and semantic analysis, the interaction with a speech
recognizer, and a detailed evaluation analysis of the robustness under the
influence of noisy or incomplete input. The main result of this paper is that
flat representations allow more robust processing of spontaneous spoken
language than deeply structured representations. In particular, we show how the
fault-tolerance and learning capability of connectionist networks can support a
flat analysis for providing more robust spoken-language processing within an
overall hybrid symbolic/connectionist framework.Comment: 51 pages, Postscript. To be published in Journal of Artificial
Intelligence Research 6(1), 199
Exploiting Contextual Information for Prosodic Event Detection Using Auto-Context
Prosody and prosodic boundaries carry significant information regarding linguistics and paralinguistics and are important aspects of speech. In the field of prosodic event detection, many local acoustic features have been investigated; however, contextual information has not yet been thoroughly exploited. The most difficult aspect of this lies in learning the long-distance contextual dependencies effectively and efficiently. To address this problem, we introduce the use of an algorithm called auto-context. In this algorithm, a classifier is first trained based on a set of local acoustic features, after which the generated probabilities are used along with the local features as contextual information to train new classifiers. By iteratively using updated probabilities as the contextual information, the algorithm can accurately model contextual dependencies and improve classification ability. The advantages of this method include its flexible structure and the ability of capturing contextual relationships. When using the auto-context algorithm based on support vector machine, we can improve the detection accuracy by about 3% and F-score by more than 7% on both two-way and four-way pitch accent detections in combination with the acoustic context. For boundary detection, the accuracy improvement is about 1% and the F-score improvement reaches 12%. The new algorithm outperforms conditional random fields, especially on boundary detection in terms of F-score. It also outperforms an n-gram language model on the task of pitch accent detection
Skeleton Key: Image Captioning by Skeleton-Attribute Decomposition
Recently, there has been a lot of interest in automatically generating
descriptions for an image. Most existing language-model based approaches for
this task learn to generate an image description word by word in its original
word order. However, for humans, it is more natural to locate the objects and
their relationships first, and then elaborate on each object, describing
notable attributes. We present a coarse-to-fine method that decomposes the
original image description into a skeleton sentence and its attributes, and
generates the skeleton sentence and attribute phrases separately. By this
decomposition, our method can generate more accurate and novel descriptions
than the previous state-of-the-art. Experimental results on the MS-COCO and a
larger scale Stock3M datasets show that our algorithm yields consistent
improvements across different evaluation metrics, especially on the SPICE
metric, which has much higher correlation with human ratings than the
conventional metrics. Furthermore, our algorithm can generate descriptions with
varied length, benefiting from the separate control of the skeleton and
attributes. This enables image description generation that better accommodates
user preferences.Comment: Accepted by CVPR 201
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