Effects of Paraquat and Alachlor on Soil Microorganisms in Peat Soil

A study was carried out to investigate the effects of alachlor and paraquat on microbial activities in peat soil. Effects of the herbicides on CO2 evolution and phosphatase activity were monitored for 12 weeks in ambient conditions. The results showed that paraquat and alachlor caused an initial increase in CO2 released and subsequently decreased after 53 days of incubation. Comparatively, more CO2 was released from the soil treated with alachlor than that treated with paraquat. An initial increase in phosphatase activity was observed for both herbicides but the level of activity was substantially reduced after 12 days of incubation. Fungal and bacterial populations in the soil were also affected by both herbicides. At 250 ppm, alachlor and paraquat caused a reduction in bacterial population of 78%and 95% respectively. Alachlor was shown to be more toxic to fungal populations in the soil than paraquat

Interactive voice response technology for telephony system

Speech is tbe primary means of communication between people. For reasons ranging from technology curiosity about the mechanism for mechanical realization of human speech capabilities. To the desire to automate simple tasks inherently requiring human-machine interactions. There have been many interesting advances and developments since the invention of the first speech recognizer at Bell Labs in the early 1950's. Besides inventing useful automated speech recognizers, scientislS and researchers' contribUlions were to produce emeienl algorilhms lhal help 10 pnxlucc beller quality aulomated speech recognition systems. and improve lhe accuracy and malching standanrd in order to make the syslems more usefu

Assessing the naturalness of Malay emotional voice corpora

This research reports the development and evaluation of Malay emotional voice corpora through listening evaluation, and how the numbers of emotion choices offered to evaluators affect the result of the evaluation. The voice corpora comprises of three emotions, namely anger, sadness and happiness being expressed by two male and two female actors. The voice corpora were evaluated in two separate listening tests involving a number of Malay native evaluators balanced for gender, age and profession. In the first listening test, evaluators were given twenty five choices of emotions to choose from. For the second test, the number of emotion choices is only five. Each test was conducted separately with different group of evaluators. The results of the two tests are grossly different with the emotion identification rate of the first test lower than the second test

GIS Based Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Landslide Hazard Zonation

AbstractGrowing population and expansion of settlements over hilly areas have largely increased the impact of natural disasters such as landslide. This paper deals with the use of Geographical Information System (GIS) and Multi-criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique to map the landslide hazard zones. For this study, ten (10) landslide inducing parameters are considered. Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) and rating method are used to determine the weights for each of the parameters used. Two (2) different models which consider different parameter combinations developed by the authors are used. Results obtained are compared to landslide history and the accuracies for the two models i.e. Model 1 and Model 2 are 72% and 64% respectively

Undergraduate Critical Thinking and Reading of Academic Texts

This article sought to investigate whether seven Malaysian undergraduate students were able to respond critically to the academic texts delivered to them and to the reading strategies they used to read those texts. Data were collected through the thought protocol out loud and the retrospective interview, and subsequently transcribed, translated and analyzed for recurring topics. The findings indicate that the seven participants responded critically to the texts given, as evidenced by the adoption of all or some of the strategies of critical reading of interpretation, analysis, evaluation, deduction, explanation, and self-regulation; the interpretation being the most used strategy. The results of the study also revealed that although university students could use critical reading strategies, they could only do so to a certain extent. It concludes by urging instructors and policymakers to seriously consider the teaching of critical reading, as it gives a purpose and guidance to university students to think critically and prepare for better academic performance and future challenges

ASSESSING THE NATURALNESS OF MALAY EMOTIONAL VOICE CORPORA

ABSTRACT This research reports the development and evaluation of Malay emotional voice corpora through listening evaluation, and how the numbers of emotion choices offered to evaluators affect the result of the evaluation. The voice corpora comprises of three emotions, namely anger, sadness and happiness being expressed by two male and two female actors. The voice corpora were evaluated in two separate listening tests involving a number of Malay native evaluators balanced for gender, age and profession. In the first listening test, evaluators were given twenty five choices of emotions to choose from. For the second test, the number of emotion choices is only five. Each test was conducted separately with different group of evaluators. The results of the two tests are grossly different with the emotion identification rate of the first test lower than the second test

Phonetically rich and balanced arabic speech corpus: An overview

Lack of spoken and written training data is one o f the main issues encountered by Arabic automatic speech recognition (ASR) researchers. Almost all written and spoken corpora are not readily available to the public and many of them can only be obtained by purchasing from the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) or the European Language Resource Association (ELRA). There is more shortage of spoken training data as compared to written training data resulting in a great need for more speech corpora in order to serve different domains of Arabic ASR. The available spoken corpora were mainly collected from broadcast news (radios and televisions), and telephone conversations having certain technical and quality shortcomings. In order to produce a robust speaker-independent continuous automatic Arabic speech recognizer, a set of speech recordings that are rich and balanced is required. The rich characteristic is in the sense that it must contain all the phonemes of Arabic language. It must be balanced in preserving the phonetics distribution of Arabic language too. This set of speech recordings must be based on a proper written set of sentences and phrases created by experts. Therefore, it is crucial to create a high quality written (text) set of the sentences and phrases before recording them. This work adds a new kind of possible speech data for Arabic language based text and speech applications besides other kinds such as broadcast news and telephone conversations. Therefore, this work is an invitation to all Arabic ASR developers and research groups to explore and capitalize

Natural speaker-independent Arabic speech recognition system based on Hidden Markov Models using Sphinx tools

This paper reports the design, implementation, and evaluation of a research work for developing a high performance natural speaker-independent Arabic continuous speech recognition system. It aims to explore the usefulness and success of a newly developed speech corpus, which is phonetically rich and balanced, presenting a competitive approach towards the development of an Arabic ASR system as compared to the state-of-the-art Arabic ASR researches. The developed Arabic AS R mainly used the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Sphinx tools together with the Cambridge HTK tools. To extract features from speech signals, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) technique was applied producing a set of feature vectors. Subsequently, the system uses five-state Hidden Markov Models (HMM) with three emitting states for tri-phone acoustic modeling. The emission probability distribution of the states was best using continuous density 16 Gaussian mixture distributions. The state distributions were tied to 500 senons. The language model contains uni-grams, bi-grams, and tri-grams. The system was trained on 7.0 hours of phonetically rich and balanced Arabic speech corpus and tested on another one hour. For similar speakers but different sentences, the system obtained a word recognition accuracy of 92.67% and 93.88% and a Word Error Rate (WER) of 11.27% and 10.07% with and without diacritical marks respectively. For different speakers but similar sentences, the system obtained a word recognition accuracy of 95.92% and 96.29% and a Word Error Rate (WER) of 5.78% and 5.45% with and without diacritical marks respectively. Whereas different speakers and different sentences, the system obtained a word recognition accuracy of 89.08% and 90.23% and a Word Error Rate (WER) of 15.59% and 14.44% with and without diacritical marks respectively

Prosodic Analysis And Modelling For Malay Emotional Speech Synthesis

ABSTRACT Keywords: Emotional speech re-synthesis; Prosody conversion; Rule-based approach, MBROLA INTRODUCTION Advances in speech synthesis research in recent years have made it possible to produce computer speech, which is very close to human speech. However, the generation of synthesized speech expressing emotions has been less successful, as it involves not only computer science but also other fields of speech research, including linguistics, psychology and signal processing. One method of simulating emotions in neutral speech is by prosody modelling, in which a set of factors including F0, duration and intensity are controlled in order to convey non-lexical and pragmatic information in speech. Several studies have investigated the role of prosodic features in synthesized emotional speech in a range of languages and cultures, including [1], [2], [3] and [4]. This research focuses on improving the prosody modelling to address the issue of naturalness in synthesized emotional speech for Malay. Apart from some seminal studies RELATED WORK Various approaches have been proposed in the literature for the generation of appropriate prosody in synthesizing emotional speech, including corpus-based, rule-based, template-based and learning-based approaches. The rule-based approach simulates the emotion by manipulating speech properties such as F0