Sperry Univac speech communications technology

Technology and systems for effective verbal communication with computers were developed. A continuous speech recognition system for verbal input, a word spotting system to locate key words in conversational speech, prosodic tools to aid speech analysis, and a prerecorded voice response system for speech output are described

Visual to auditory silent matching task in adults who do and do not stutter

textThe purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of phonological working memory in adults who do and do not stutter through a visual to auditory silent matching task. This task also explored the possible relationship between auditory processing and its ability to affect performance on the task. Participants were 13 adults who stutter (mean age = 28 years), matched in age, gender, handedness, and education level with 13 adults who do not stutter (mean age = 28 years). For the nonvocal visual to auditory task, participants silently read an initial target nonword and matched that target nonword to four subsequent auditory nonword choices. The participants completed this task for 4- syllable and 7- syllable nonwords (N = 8 per set). Results indicated that adults who stutter were significantly less accurate than adults who do not stutter at both syllable lengths. Our present findings support previous research that suggests less efficient phonological working memory in adults who stutter.Communication Sciences and Disorder

Predicting future reading problems based on pre-reading auditory measures: a longitudinal study of children with a familial risk of dyslexia

Purpose: This longitudinal study examines measures of temporal auditory processing in pre-reading children with a family risk of dyslexia. Specifically, it attempts to ascertain whether pre-reading auditory processing, speech perception, and phonological awareness (PA) reliably predict later literacy achievement. Additionally, this study retrospectively examines the presence of pre-reading auditory processing, speech perception, and PA impairments in children later found to be literacy impaired. Method: Forty-four pre-reading children with and without a family risk of dyslexia were assessed at three time points (kindergarten, first, and second grade). Auditory processing measures of rise time (RT) discrimination and frequency modulation (FM) along with speech perception, PA, and various literacy tasks were assessed. Results: Kindergarten RT uniquely contributed to growth in literacy in grades one and two, even after controlling for letter knowledge and PA. Highly significant concurrent and predictive correlations were observed with kindergarten RT significantly predicting first grade PA. Retrospective analysis demonstrated atypical performance in RT and PA at all three time points in children who later developed literacy impairments. Conclusions: Although significant, kindergarten auditory processing contributions to later literacy growth lack the power to be considered as a single-cause predictor; thus results support temporal processing deficits’ contribution within a multiple deficit model of dyslexia

The use of long-term features for GMM- and i-vector-based speaker diarization systems

Several factors contribute to the performance of speaker diarization systems. For instance, the appropriate selection of speech features is one of the key aspects that affect speaker diarization systems. The other factors include the techniques employed to perform both segmentation and clustering. While the static mel frequency cepstral coefficients are the most widely used features in speech-related tasks including speaker diarization, several studies have shown the benefits of augmenting regular speech features with the static ones. In this work, we have proposed and assessed the use of voice-quality features (i.e., jitter, shimmer, and Glottal-to-Noise Excitation ratio) within the framework of speaker diarization. These acoustic attributes are employed together with the state-of-the-art short-term cepstral and long-term prosodic features. Additionally, the use of delta dynamic features is also explored separately both for segmentation and bottom-up clustering sub-tasks. The combination of the different feature sets is carried out at several levels. At the feature level, the long-term speech features are stacked in the same feature vector. At the score level, the short- and long-term speech features are independently modeled and fused at the score likelihood level. Various feature combinations have been applied both for Gaussian mixture modeling and i-vector-based speaker diarization systems. The experiments have been carried out on Augmented Multi-party Interaction meeting corpus. The best result, in terms of diarization error rate, is reported by using i-vector-based cosine-distance clustering together with a signal parameterization consisting of a combination of static cepstral coefficients, delta, voice-quality, and prosodic features. The best result shows about 24% relative diarization error rate improvement compared to the baseline system which is based on Gaussian mixture modeling and short-term static cepstral coefficients.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Exploiting Sentence Embedding for Medical Question Answering

Despite the great success of word embedding, sentence embedding remains a not-well-solved problem. In this paper, we present a supervised learning framework to exploit sentence embedding for the medical question answering task. The learning framework consists of two main parts: 1) a sentence embedding producing module, and 2) a scoring module. The former is developed with contextual self-attention and multi-scale techniques to encode a sentence into an embedding tensor. This module is shortly called Contextual self-Attention Multi-scale Sentence Embedding (CAMSE). The latter employs two scoring strategies: Semantic Matching Scoring (SMS) and Semantic Association Scoring (SAS). SMS measures similarity while SAS captures association between sentence pairs: a medical question concatenated with a candidate choice, and a piece of corresponding supportive evidence. The proposed framework is examined by two Medical Question Answering(MedicalQA) datasets which are collected from real-world applications: medical exam and clinical diagnosis based on electronic medical records (EMR). The comparison results show that our proposed framework achieved significant improvements compared to competitive baseline approaches. Additionally, a series of controlled experiments are also conducted to illustrate that the multi-scale strategy and the contextual self-attention layer play important roles for producing effective sentence embedding, and the two kinds of scoring strategies are highly complementary to each other for question answering problems.Comment: 8 page

The typical developmental trajectory of social and executive functions in late adolescence and early adulthood.

Executive functions and social cognition develop through childhood into adolescence/early adulthood and are important for adaptive goal-oriented behaviour (Apperly, Samson & Humphreys, 2009; Blakemore & Choudhury, 2006). These functions are attributed to frontal networks known to undergo protracted maturation into early adulthood (Barker, Andrade, Morton, Romanowski & Bowles, 2010; Lebel, Walker, Leemans, Phillips & Beaulieu, 2008) although social cognition functions are also associated with widely distributed networks. Previously, non-linear development has been reported around puberty on an emotion match to sample task (McGivern, Andersen, Byrd, Mutter & Reilly, 2002) and for IQ in mid adolescence (Ramsden et al., 2011). However, there are currently little data on the typical development of social and executive functions in late adolescence and early adulthood. In a cross sectional design, 98 participants completed tests of social cognition and executive function, Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (Wechsler, 1999), Positive and Negative Affect Scale (Watson, Clark & Tellegan, 1988), Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (Zigmond & Snaith, 1983) and measures of pubertal development and demographics at age 17, 18 and 19. Non-linear age differences for letter fluency and concept formation executive functions were found, with a trough in functional ability in 18 year olds compared to other groups. There were no age group differences on social cognition measures. Gender accounted for differences on one scale of concept formation, one dynamic social interaction scale and two empathy scales. The clinical, developmental and educational implications of these findings are discussed