Development of a speech recognition system for Spanish broadcast news

This paper reports on the development process of a speech recognition system for Spanish broadcast news within the MESH FP6 project. The system uses the SONIC recognizer developed at the Center for Spoken Language Research (CSLR), University of Colorado. Acoustic and language models were trained using Hub4 broadcast news data. Experiments and evaluation results are reported

A geo-temporal information extraction service for processing descriptive metadata in digital libraries

In the context of digital map libraries, resources are usually described according to metadata records that define the relevant subject, location, time-span, format and keywords. On what concerns locations and time-spans, metadata records are often incomplete or they provide information in a way that is not machine-understandable (e.g. textual descriptions). This paper presents techniques for extracting geotemporal information from text, using relatively simple text mining methods that leverage on a Web gazetteer service. The idea is to go from human-made geotemporal referencing (i.e. using place and period names in textual expressions) into geo-spatial coordinates and time-spans. A prototype system, implementing the proposed methods, is described in detail. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approaches

Special repo rates: an introduction

Transactions involving repurchase agreements (known as repos and reverses) are important tools the Federal Reserve uses in implementing monetary policy. By undertaking such transactions with primary dealers, the Fed can temporarily increase or decrease the quantity of reserves in the banking system. The focus of this article is the repo market, especially the role the market plays in the financing and hedging activities of primary dealers. The author explains the close relation between the price premium that newly auctioned, or on-the-run, Treasury securities command and the special repo rates on those securities. The author's analysis demonstrates that the rents that can be earned from special repo rates are capitalized into the price of the underlying bond so as to keep the equilibrium rate of return unchanged. ; The discussion begins with a description of repos and reverses, the difference between on-the-run and older securities, and the ways dealers use repos to finance and hedge. The article then examines the difference between general and specific collateral, defines the repo spread and dividend, presents a framework for determining the equilibrium repo spread, and describes the average pattern of overnight repo spreads over the auction cycle. Finally, the article discusses convergence trades and repo squeezes. Two appendixes provide detailed analysis.Repurchase agreements ; Government securities

Income statements "by nature" and analysis of company performance : an application of US airlines companies

Since September 11, 2001; and during the ensuing economic slowdown, U.S airline companies have experienced significant financial difficulties, including bankruptcies and near bankruptcies on the part of several major carriers. In an economic setting where U.S. airlines are struggling to achieve or maintain profitability, it is important for accountants, auditors and financial analysts to be able to analyze the relative performance of airline companies. In the airline industry, income statements are normally prepared "by nature" rather than "by function". This differs from the usual presentation found in the income statements of most American companies. This case demonstrates how to perform a comparative financial statement analysis when an income statement is prepared "by nature", by applying a tool called the "Statement of Intermediate Balances". The three companies studied in this case are United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Southwest Airlinesfinancial statement analysis; income statement format; income statement by nature; income statement by function; statement of intermediate balances

How Do Banks Set Interest Rates?

The aim of this paper is to study cross-sectional differences in banks interest rates. It adds to the existing literature in two ways. First, it analyzes in a systematic way both micro and macroeconomic factors that influence the price setting behavior of banks. Second, by using banks' prices (rather than quantities) it provides an alternative way to disentangle loan supply from loan demand shift in the bank lending channel' literature. The results, derived from a sample of Italian banks, suggest that heterogeneity in the banking rates pass-through exists only in the short run. Consistently with the literature for Italy, interest rates on shortterm lending of liquid and well-capitalized banks react less to a monetary policy shock. Also banks with a high proportion of long-term lending tend to change their prices less. Heterogeneity in the pass-through on the interest rate on current accounts depends mainly on banks' liability structure. Bank's size is never relevant.

Intangible Capital and Economic Growth

Published macroeconomic data traditionally exclude most intangible investment from measured GDP. This situation is beginning to change, but our estimates suggest that as much as $800 billion is still excluded from U.S. published data (as of 2003), and that this leads to the exclusion of more than$3 trillion of business intangible capital stock. To assess the importance of this omission, we add capital to the standard sources-of-growth framework used by the BLS, and find that the inclusion of our list of intangible assets makes a significant difference in the observed patterns of U.S. economic growth. The rate of change of output per worker increases more rapidly when intangibles are counted as capital, and capital deepening becomes the unambiguously dominant source of growth in labor productivity. The role of multifactor productivity is correspondingly diminished, and labor's income share is found to have decreased significantly over the last 50 years.