Acoustic Modeling Using a Shallow CNN-HTSVM Architecture

High-accuracy speech recognition is especially challenging when large datasets are not available. It is possible to bridge this gap with careful and knowledge-driven parsing combined with the biologically inspired CNN and the learning guarantees of the Vapnik Chervonenkis (VC) theory. This work presents a Shallow-CNN-HTSVM (Hierarchical Tree Support Vector Machine classifier) architecture which uses a predefined knowledge-based set of rules with statistical machine learning techniques. Here we show that gross errors present even in state-of-the-art systems can be avoided and that an accurate acoustic model can be built in a hierarchical fashion. The CNN-HTSVM acoustic model outperforms traditional GMM-HMM models and the HTSVM structure outperforms a MLP multi-class classifier. More importantly we isolate the performance of the acoustic model and provide results on both the frame and phoneme level considering the true robustness of the model. We show that even with a small amount of data accurate and robust recognition rates can be obtained.Comment: Pre-review version of Bracis 201

Ethically conflictive situations for discussion with medical students: a professor's view

The ethical and humanistic training of medical students has been both valued and questioned in recent years. Discussion of the ethical conflicts that arise during future medical practice is one of the strategies with the greatest impact for developing students' moral skills. With the aim of identifying and analyzing the most relevant conflictive situations for discussion with future physicians, we asked faculty members working with medical students at the UNIFESP-EPM School of Medicine to list three important situations for discussion. The sample included 237 participants. The answers were recorded as items and categorized thematically, and were compared to the topics covered in formal ethics courses in Brazilian medical schools, analyzed in relation to the specialized literature. The themes that emerged in this study can be explored through different teaching-learning strategies. It is up to medical schools to encourage the different disciplines and rotations to provide formal spaces for discussions and to promote awareness raising of faculty members for this task.A formação ética e humanística dos estudantes de Medicina vem sendo bastante valorizada e questionada na atualidade. A discussão dos conflitos éticos que surgem durante o exercício da medicina é uma das estratégias de maior impacto para o desenvolvimento da competência moral dos estudantes. Com o objetivo de conhecer e analisar as situações de conflito consideradas mais relevantes para a discussão com os futuros médicos, pedimos a profissionais que exercem atividades de ensino com estudantes de Medicina na UNIFESP-EPM que mencionassem até três situações importantes para discussão. Participaram da pesquisa 237 sujeitos. As respostas, registradas por itens e categorizadas por temas, foram comparadas aos assuntos abordados em cursos formais de ética das escolas médicas brasileiras e analisadas à luz da literatura especializada. Os temas que emergiram desta pesquisa podem ser explorados por diferentes estratégias de ensino-aprendizagem. Cabe às escolas médicas estimular as diversas disciplinas a abrir espaços formais para as discussões e investir na conscientização e no preparo docente para esta tarefa.Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP)UNIFESPSciEL

A Lightweight Regression Method to Infer Psycholinguistic Properties for Brazilian Portuguese

Psycholinguistic properties of words have been used in various approaches to Natural Language Processing tasks, such as text simplification and readability assessment. Most of these properties are subjective, involving costly and time-consuming surveys to be gathered. Recent approaches use the limited datasets of psycholinguistic properties to extend them automatically to large lexicons. However, some of the resources used by such approaches are not available to most languages. This study presents a method to infer psycholinguistic properties for Brazilian Portuguese (BP) using regressors built with a light set of features usually available for less resourced languages: word length, frequency lists, lexical databases composed of school dictionaries and word embedding models. The correlations between the properties inferred are close to those obtained by related works. The resulting resource contains 26,874 words in BP annotated with concreteness, age of acquisition, imageability and subjective frequency.Comment: Paper accepted for TSD201

O tratamento de marcadores discursivos em uma ferramenta de apoio à escrita acadêmica em português para nativos de espanhol

We report in this paper the development of a module dedicated to discourse markers in HABLA (Hispanofalantes Purchasing an Academic Lin-guistic Base), a tool designed to support native Spanish speakers in their aca-demic writing in Portuguese. HABLA is conceived to meet the needs of native Spanish speakers who are enrolled in Brazilian federal and state institutions and must write a dissertation or thesis in Portuguese. The diagnosis of difficulties faced by the learners in the use of discourse markers is based on the analysis of a learners’ corpus. Part of these difficulties are addressed by two procedures al-ready implemented that identify the problems automatically and present sugges-tions. The development of the module encompasses the compilation of a bilin-gual lexicon of discourse markers – Spanish-Portuguese - as well as a list of false friends discourse markers

Filling the gap: inserting an artificial constituent where a subject is omitted in Portuguese

This paper reports the first efforts to insert null elements to represent omitted subjects in Portuguese. Our aim is to fill some gaps in the syntactic structure in order to facilitate the assignment of semantic role labels and thus provide a better training corpus for SRL classifiers. The main advantage of inserting such null elements is to reduce data sparsity, as all the verbal clauses become similar in what concerns the presence of explicit subjects. The results show a better precision in the insertion of null elements related to subjects of verbs inflected in the first person, both singular and plural.Samsung Eletrônica da Amazônia Ltda

Generating a lexicon of errors in Portuguese to support an error identification system for Spanish native learners

Portuguese is a less resourced language in what concerns foreign language learning. Aiming to inform a module of a system designed to support scientific written production of Spanish native speakers learning Portuguese, we developed an approach to automatically generate a lexicon of wrong words, reproducing language transfer errors made by such foreign learners. Each item of the artificially generated lexicon contains, besides the wrong word, the respective Spanish and Portuguese correct words. The wrong word is used to identify the interlanguage error and the correct Spanish and Portuguese forms are used to generate the suggestions. Keeping control of the correct word forms, we can provide correction or, at least, useful suggestions for the learners. We propose to combine two automatic procedures to obtain the error correction: i) a similarity measure and ii) a translation algorithm based on aligned parallel corpus. The similarity-based method achieved a precision of 52%, where as the alignment-based method achieved a precision of 90%. In this paper we focus only on interlanguage errors involving suffixes that have different forms in both languages. The approach, however, is very promising to tackle other types of errors, such as gender errors.Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP

A revelação da soropositividade por homens bissexuais e heterossexuais para parceiros sexuais: um desafio para o cuidado e a prevenção do HIV/AIDS

This study investigated the disclosure of HIV-positive serostatus to sexual partners by heterosexual and bisexual men, selected in centers for HIV/AIDS care. In 250 interviews, we investigated disclosure of serostatus to partners, correlating disclosure to characteristics of relationships. The focus group further explored barriers to maintenance/establishment of partnerships and their association with disclosure and condom use. Fear of rejection led to isolation and distress, thus hindering disclosure to current and new partners. Disclosure requires trust and was more frequent to steady partners, to partners who were HIV-positive themselves, to female partners, and by heterosexuals, occurring less frequently with commercial sex workers. Most interviewees reported consistent condom use. Unprotected sex was more frequent with seropositive partners. Suggestions to enhance comprehensive care for HIV-positive men included stigma management, group activities, and human rights-based approaches involving professional education in care for sexual health, disclosure, and care of "persons living with HIV".Este estudo investigou a revelação da soropositividade para parceiro/as sexuais por homens, hetero e bissexuais, usuários de serviços especializados no cuidado ao HIV/AIDS. Por meio de 250 entrevistas individuais e grupo focal descrevemos a revelação segundo características das parcerias e discutimos as dificuldades para manter ou estabelecer novas relações afetivo-sexuais e com o sexo protegido. Observamos que o temor à rejeição provoca isolamento e sofrimento e dificultava a revelação para parceira/os atuais ou futuro/as. Revelar requer confiança e foi mais frequente para parceira/os fixa/os, para soropositiva/os, para mulheres, e menos frequente para parceiro/as pagos por "programa". Heterossexuais revelavam mais. A maioria usava preservativos consistentemente, embora menos frequentemente com parceiros soropositivos. Para melhorar o cuidado integral de homens soropositivos, sugere-se a "gestão do estigma", atividades em grupo e abordagens baseadas em direitos humanos que capacitem profissionais para o cuidado da vida sexual-afetiva, da revelação e ao apoio ao viver com HIV.CNP