52 research outputs found

    Automated Testing of Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation in Telecom Networks

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    Globalisoituvassa maailmassa kyky kommunikoida kielimuurien yli käy yhä tärkeämmäksi. Kielten opiskelu on työlästä ja siksi halutaan kehittää automaattisia konekäännösjärjestelmiä. Ericsson on kehittänyt prototyypin nimeltä Real-Time Interpretation System (RTIS), joka toimii mobiiliverkossa ja kääntää matkailuun liittyviä fraaseja puhemuodossa kahden kielen välillä. Nykyisten konekäännösjärjestelmien suorituskyky on suhteellisen huono ja siksi testauksella on suuri merkitys järjestelmien suunnittelussa. Testauksen tarkoituksena on varmistaa, että järjestelmä säilyttää käännösekvivalenssin sekä puhekäännösjärjestelmän tapauksessa myös riittävän puheenlaadun. Luotettavimmin testaus voidaan suorittaa ihmisten antamiin arviointeihin perustuen, mutta tällaisen testauksen kustannukset ovat suuria ja tulokset subjektiivisia. Tässä työssä suunniteltiin ja analysoitiin automatisoitu testiympäristö Real-Time Interpretation System -käännösprototyypille. Tavoitteina oli tutkia, voidaanko testaus suorittaa automatisoidusti ja pystytäänkö todellinen, käyttäjän havaitsema käännösten laatu mittaamaan automatisoidun testauksen keinoin. Tulokset osoittavat että mobiiliverkoissa puheenlaadun testaukseen käytetyt menetelmät eivät ole optimaalisesti sovellettavissa konekäännösten testaukseen. Nykytuntemuksen mukaan ihmisten suorittama arviointi on ainoa luotettava tapa mitata käännösekvivalenssia ja puheen ymmärrettävyyttä. Konekäännösten testauksen automatisointi vaatii lisää tutkimusta, jota ennen subjektiivinen arviointi tulisi säilyttää ensisijaisena testausmenetelmänä RTIS-testauksessa.In the globalizing world, the ability to communicate over language barriers is increasingly important. Learning languages is laborious, which is why there is a strong desire to develop automatic machine translation applications. Ericsson has developed a speech-to-speech translation prototype called the Real-Time Interpretation System (RTIS). The service runs in a mobile network and translates travel phrases between two languages in speech format. The state-of-the-art machine translation systems suffer from a relatively poor performance and therefore evaluation plays a big role in machine translation development. The purpose of evaluation is to ensure the system preserves the translational equivalence, and in case of a speech-to-speech system, the speech quality. The evaluation is most reliably done by human judges. However, human-conducted evaluation is costly and subjective. In this thesis, a test environment for Ericsson Real-Time Interpretation System prototype is designed and analyzed. The goals are to investigate if the RTIS verification can be conducted automatically, and if the test environment can truthfully measure the end-to-end performance of the system. The results conclude that methods used in end-to-end speech quality verification in mobile networks can not be optimally adapted for machine translation evaluation. With current knowledge, human-conducted evaluation is the only method that can truthfully measure translational equivalence and the speech intelligibility. Automating machine translation evaluation needs further research, until which human-conducted evaluation should remain the preferred method in RTIS verification

    Spoken dialogue systems: architectures and applications

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    171 p.Technology and technological devices have become habitual and omnipresent. Humans need to learn tocommunicate with all kind of devices. Until recently humans needed to learn how the devices expressthemselves to communicate with them. But in recent times the tendency has become to makecommunication with these devices in more intuitive ways. The ideal way to communicate with deviceswould be the natural way of communication between humans, the speech. Humans have long beeninvestigating and designing systems that use this type of communication, giving rise to the so-calledSpoken Dialogue Systems.In this context, the primary goal of the thesis is to show how these systems can be implemented.Additionally, the thesis serves as a review of the state-of-the-art regarding architectures and toolkits.Finally, the thesis is intended to serve future system developers as a guide for their construction. For that

    Synthesizing structured text from logical database subsets. EDBT

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    ABSTRACT In the classical database world, information access has been based on a paradigm that involves structured, schema-aware, queries and tabular answers. In the current environment, however, where information prevails in most activities of society, serving people, applications, and devices in dramatically increasing numbers, this paradigm has proved to be very limited. On the query side, much work has been done on moving towards keyword queries over structured data. In our previous work, we have touched the other side as well, and have proposed a paradigm that generates entire databases in response to keyword queries. In this paper, we continue in the same direction and propose synthesizing textual answers in response to queries of any kind over structured data. In particular, we study the transformation of a dynamically-generated logical database subset into a narrative through a customizable, extensible, and templatebased process. In doing so, we exploit the structured nature of database schemas and describe three generic translation modules for different formations in the schema, called unary, split, and join modules. We have implemented the proposed translation procedure into our own database front end and have performed several experiments evaluating the textual answers generated as several features and parameters of the system are varied. We have also conducted a set of experiments measuring the effectiveness of such answers on users. The overall results are very encouraging and indicate the promise that our approach has for several applications

    Narrowband IoT: from the end device to the cloud. An experimental end-to-end study

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    This thesis is about a novel study and experimentation of a Cloud IoT application, communicating over a NB-IoT Italian network. So far there no been presented studies, which are about the interactions between the NB-IoT network and the cloud. This thesis not only fill this gap but also shows the use of Cognitive Services to interact, through the human voice, with the IoT application. Compared with other types of mobile networks, NB-IoT is the best choice

    Interacção multimodal : contribuições para simplificar o desenvolvimento de aplicações

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    Doutoramento em Engenharia InformáticaA forma como interagimos com os dispositivos que nos rodeiam, no nosso diaa- dia, está a mudar constantemente, consequência do aparecimento de novas tecnologias e métodos que proporcionam melhores e mais aliciantes formas de interagir com as aplicações. No entanto, a integração destas tecnologias, para possibilitar a sua utilização alargada, coloca desafios significativos e requer, da parte de quem desenvolve, um conhecimento alargado das tecnologias envolvidas. Apesar de a literatura mais recente apresentar alguns avanços no suporte ao desenho e desenvolvimento de sistemas interactivos multimodais, vários aspectos chave têm ainda de ser resolvidos para que se atinja o seu real potencial. Entre estes aspectos, um exemplo relevante é o da dificuldade em desenvolver e integrar múltiplas modalidades de interacção. Neste trabalho, propomos, desenhamos e implementamos uma framework que permite um mais fácil desenvolvimento de interacção multimodal. A nossa proposta mantém as modalidades de interacção completamente separadas da aplicação, permitindo um desenvolvimento, independente de cada uma das partes. A framework proposta já inclui um conjunto de modalidades genéricas e módulos que podem ser usados em novas aplicações. De entre as modalidades genéricas, a modalidade de voz mereceu particular atenção, tendo em conta a relevância crescente da interacção por voz, por exemplo em cenários como AAL, e a complexidade associada ao seu desenvolvimento. Adicionalmente, a nossa proposta contempla ainda o suporte à gestão de aplicações multi-dispositivo e inclui um método e respectivo módulo para criar fusão entre eventos. O desenvolvimento da arquitectura e da framework ocorreu num contexto de I&D diversificado, incluindo vários projectos, cenários de aplicação e parceiros internacionais. A framework permitiu o desenho e desenvolvimento de um conjunto alargado de aplicações multimodais, sendo um exemplo digno de nota o assistente pessoal AALFred, do projecto PaeLife. Estas aplicações, por sua vez, serviram um contínuo melhoramento da framework, suportando a recolha iterativa de novos requisitos, e permitido demonstrar a sua versatilidade e capacidades.The way we interact with the devices around us, in everyday life, is constantly changing, boosted by emerging technologies and methods, providing better and more engaging ways to interact with applications. Nevertheless, the integration with these technologies, to enable their widespread use in current systems, presents a notable challenge and requires considerable knowhow from developers. While the recent literature has made some advances in supporting the design and development of multimodal interactive systems, several key aspects have yet to be addressed to enable its full potential. Among these, a relevant example is the difficulty to develop and integrate multiple interaction modalities. In this work, we propose, design and implement a framework enabling easier development of multimodal interaction. Our proposal fully decouples the interaction modalities from the application, allowing the separate development of each part. The proposed framework already includes a set of generic modalities and modules ready to be used in novel applications. Among the proposed generic modalities, the speech modality deserved particular attention, attending to the increasing relevance of speech interaction, for example in scenarios such as AAL, and the complexity behind its development. Additionally, our proposal also tackles the support for managing multi-device applications and includes a method and corresponding module to create fusion of events. The development of the architecture and framework profited from a rich R&D context including several projects, scenarios, and international partners. The framework successfully supported the design and development of a wide set of multimodal applications, a notable example being AALFred, the personal assistant of project PaeLife. These applications, in turn, served the continuous improvement of the framework by supporting the iterative collection of novel requirements, enabling the proposed framework to show its versatility and potential

    Integrating deep and shallow natural language processing components : representations and hybrid architectures

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    We describe basic concepts and software architectures for the integration of shallow and deep (linguistics-based, semantics-oriented) natural language processing (NLP) components. The main goal of this novel, hybrid integration paradigm is improving robustness of deep processing. After an introduction to constraint-based natural language parsing, we give an overview of typical shallow processing tasks. We introduce XML standoff markup as an additional abstraction layer that eases integration of NLP components, and propose the use of XSLT as a standardized and efficient transformation language for online NLP integration. In the main part of the thesis, we describe our contributions to three hybrid architecture frameworks that make use of these fundamentals. SProUT is a shallow system that uses elements of deep constraint-based processing, namely type hierarchy and typed feature structures. WHITEBOARD is the first hybrid architecture to integrate not only part-of-speech tagging, but also named entity recognition and topological parsing, with deep parsing. Finally, we present Heart of Gold, a middleware architecture that generalizes WHITEBOARD into various dimensions such as configurability, multilinguality and flexible processing strategies. We describe various applications that have been implemented using the hybrid frameworks such as structured named entity recognition, information extraction, creative document authoring support, deep question analysis, as well as evaluations. In WHITEBOARD, e.g., it could be shown that shallow pre-processing increases both coverage and efficiency of deep parsing by a factor of more than two. Heart of Gold not only forms the basis for applications that utilize semanticsoriented natural language analysis, but also constitutes a complex research instrument for experimenting with novel processing strategies combining deep and shallow methods, and eases replication and comparability of results.Diese Arbeit beschreibt Grundlagen und Software-Architekturen für die Integration von flachen mit tiefen (linguistikbasierten und semantikorientierten) Verarbeitungskomponenten für natürliche Sprache. Das Hauptziel dieses neuartigen, hybriden Integrationparadigmas ist die Verbesserung der Robustheit der tiefen Verarbeitung. Nach einer Einführung in constraintbasierte Analyse natürlicher Sprache geben wir einen Überblick über typische Aufgaben flacher Sprachverarbeitungskomponenten. Wir führen XML Standoff-Markup als zusätzliche Abstraktionsebene ein, mit deren Hilfe sich Sprachverarbeitungskomponenten einfacher integrieren lassen. Ferner schlagen wir XSLT als standardisierte und effiziente Transformationssprache für die Online-Integration vor. Im Hauptteil der Arbeit stellen wir unsere Beiträge zu drei hybriden Architekturen vor, welche auf den beschriebenen Grundlagen aufbauen. SProUT ist ein flaches System, das Elemente tiefer Verarbeitung wie Typhierarchie und getypte Merkmalsstrukturen nutzt. WHITEBOARD ist das erste System, welches nicht nur Part-of-speech-Tagging, sondern auch Eigennamenerkennung und flaches topologisches Parsing mit tiefer Verarbeitung kombiniert. Schließlich wird Heart of Gold vorgestellt, eine Middleware-Architektur, welche WHITEBOARD hinsichtlich verschiedener Dimensionen wie Konfigurierbarkeit, Mehrsprachigkeit und Unterstützung flexibler Verarbeitungsstrategien generalisiert. Wir beschreiben verschiedene, mit Hilfe der hybriden Architekturen implementierte Anwendungen wie strukturierte Eigennamenerkennung, Informationsextraktion, Kreativitätsunterstützung bei der Dokumenterstellung, tiefe Frageanalyse, sowie Evaluationen. So konnte z.B. in WHITEBOARD gezeigt werden, dass durch flache Vorverarbeitung sowohl Abdeckung als auch Effizienz des tiefen Parsers mehr als verdoppelt werden. Heart of Gold bildet nicht nur Grundlage für semantikorientierte Sprachanwendungen, sondern stellt auch eine wissenschaftliche Experimentierplattform für weitere, neuartige Kombinationsstrategien dar, welche zudem die Replizierbarkeit und Vergleichbarkeit von Ergebnissen erleichtert

    JUNO Conceptual Design Report

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    The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is proposed to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy using an underground liquid scintillator detector. It is located 53 km away from both Yangjiang and Taishan Nuclear Power Plants in Guangdong, China. The experimental hall, spanning more than 50 meters, is under a granite mountain of over 700 m overburden. Within six years of running, the detection of reactor antineutrinos can resolve the neutrino mass hierarchy at a confidence level of 3-4σ\sigma, and determine neutrino oscillation parameters sin2θ12\sin^2\theta_{12}, Δm212\Delta m^2_{21}, and Δmee2|\Delta m^2_{ee}| to an accuracy of better than 1%. The JUNO detector can be also used to study terrestrial and extra-terrestrial neutrinos and new physics beyond the Standard Model. The central detector contains 20,000 tons liquid scintillator with an acrylic sphere of 35 m in diameter. \sim17,000 508-mm diameter PMTs with high quantum efficiency provide \sim75% optical coverage. The current choice of the liquid scintillator is: linear alkyl benzene (LAB) as the solvent, plus PPO as the scintillation fluor and a wavelength-shifter (Bis-MSB). The number of detected photoelectrons per MeV is larger than 1,100 and the energy resolution is expected to be 3% at 1 MeV. The calibration system is designed to deploy multiple sources to cover the entire energy range of reactor antineutrinos, and to achieve a full-volume position coverage inside the detector. The veto system is used for muon detection, muon induced background study and reduction. It consists of a Water Cherenkov detector and a Top Tracker system. The readout system, the detector control system and the offline system insure efficient and stable data acquisition and processing.Comment: 328 pages, 211 figure

    Content Recommendation Through Linked Data

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    Nowadays, people can easily obtain a huge amount of information from the Web, but often they have no criteria to discern it. This issue is known as information overload. Recommender systems are software tools to suggest interesting items to users and can help them to deal with a vast amount of information. Linked Data is a set of best practices to publish data on the Web, and it is the basis of the Web of Data, an interconnected global dataspace. This thesis discusses how to discover information useful for the user from the vast amount of structured data, and notably Linked Data available on the Web. The work addresses this issue by considering three research questions: how to exploit existing relationships between resources published on the Web to provide recommendations to users; how to represent the user and his context to generate better recommendations for the current situation; and how to effectively visualize the recommended resources and their relationships. To address the first question, the thesis proposes a new algorithm based on Linked Data which exploits existing relationships between resources to recommend related resources. The algorithm was integrated into a framework to deploy and evaluate Linked Data based recommendation algorithms. In fact, a related problem is how to compare them and how to evaluate their performance when applied to a given dataset. The user evaluation showed that our algorithm improves the rate of new recommendations, while maintaining a satisfying prediction accuracy. To represent the user and their context, this thesis presents the Recommender System Context ontology, which is exploited in a new context-aware approach that can be used with existing recommendation algorithms. The evaluation showed that this method can significantly improve the prediction accuracy. As regards the problem of effectively visualizing the recommended resources and their relationships, this thesis proposes a visualization framework for DBpedia (the Linked Data version of Wikipedia) and mobile devices, which is designed to be extended to other datasets. In summary, this thesis shows how it is possible to exploit structured data available on the Web to recommend useful resources to users. Linked Data were successfully exploited in recommender systems. Various proposed approaches were implemented and applied to use cases of Telecom Italia

    Simple identification tools in FishBase

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    Simple identification tools for fish species were included in the FishBase information system from its inception. Early tools made use of the relational model and characters like fin ray meristics. Soon pictures and drawings were added as a further help, similar to a field guide. Later came the computerization of existing dichotomous keys, again in combination with pictures and other information, and the ability to restrict possible species by country, area, or taxonomic group. Today, www.FishBase.org offers four different ways to identify species. This paper describes these tools with their advantages and disadvantages, and suggests various options for further development. It explores the possibility of a holistic and integrated computeraided strategy
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