Multichannel Attention Network for Analyzing Visual Behavior in Public Speaking

Public speaking is an important aspect of human communication and interaction. The majority of computational work on public speaking concentrates on analyzing the spoken content, and the verbal behavior of the speakers. While the success of public speaking largely depends on the content of the talk, and the verbal behavior, non-verbal (visual) cues, such as gestures and physical appearance also play a significant role. This paper investigates the importance of visual cues by estimating their contribution towards predicting the popularity of a public lecture. For this purpose, we constructed a large database of more than $1800$ TED talk videos. As a measure of popularity of the TED talks, we leverage the corresponding (online) viewers' ratings from YouTube. Visual cues related to facial and physical appearance, facial expressions, and pose variations are extracted from the video frames using convolutional neural network (CNN) models. Thereafter, an attention-based long short-term memory (LSTM) network is proposed to predict the video popularity from the sequence of visual features. The proposed network achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy indicating that visual cues alone contain highly predictive information about the popularity of a talk. Furthermore, our network learns a human-like attention mechanism, which is particularly useful for interpretability, i.e. how attention varies with time, and across different visual cues by indicating their relative importance

Speaker segmentation and clustering

This survey focuses on two challenging speech processing topics, namely: speaker segmentation and speaker clustering. Speaker segmentation aims at finding speaker change points in an audio stream, whereas speaker clustering aims at grouping speech segments based on speaker characteristics. Model-based, metric-based, and hybrid speaker segmentation algorithms are reviewed. Concerning speaker clustering, deterministic and probabilistic algorithms are examined. A comparative assessment of the reviewed algorithms is undertaken, the algorithm advantages and disadvantages are indicated, insight to the algorithms is offered, and deductions as well as recommendations are given. Rich transcription and movie analysis are candidate applications that benefit from combined speaker segmentation and clustering. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

A Deep Sequential Model for Discourse Parsing on Multi-Party Dialogues

Discourse structures are beneficial for various NLP tasks such as dialogue understanding, question answering, sentiment analysis, and so on. This paper presents a deep sequential model for parsing discourse dependency structures of multi-party dialogues. The proposed model aims to construct a discourse dependency tree by predicting dependency relations and constructing the discourse structure jointly and alternately. It makes a sequential scan of the Elementary Discourse Units (EDUs) in a dialogue. For each EDU, the model decides to which previous EDU the current one should link and what the corresponding relation type is. The predicted link and relation type are then used to build the discourse structure incrementally with a structured encoder. During link prediction and relation classification, the model utilizes not only local information that represents the concerned EDUs, but also global information that encodes the EDU sequence and the discourse structure that is already built at the current step. Experiments show that the proposed model outperforms all the state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 201

Special Libraries, April 1954

Volume 45, Issue 4https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1954/1003/thumbnail.jp

Acoustic model adaptation for ortolan bunting (Emberiza hortulana L.) song-type classification

Automatic systems for vocalization classification often require fairly large amounts of data on which to train models. However, animal vocalization data collection and transcription is a difficult and time-consuming task, so that it is expensive to create large data sets. One natural solution to this problem is the use of acoustic adaptation methods. Such methods, common in human speech recognition systems, create initial models trained on speaker independent data, then use small amounts of adaptation data to build individual-specific models. Since, as in human speech, individual vocal variability is a significant source of variation in bioacoustic data, acoustic model adaptation is naturally suited to classification in this domain as well. To demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, this paper presents the application of maximum likelihood linear regression adaptation to ortolan bunting (Emberiza hortulana L.) song-type classification. Classification accuracies for the adapted system are computed as a function of the amount of adaptation data and compared to caller-independent and caller-dependent systems. The experimental results indicate that given the same amount of data, supervised adaptation significantly outperforms both caller-independent and caller-dependent systems