Interactive Interpretation of Serial Episodes: Experiments in musical analysis

National audienceThe context of this work is the study of sequential data that can be represented with sequences of timestamped events. The aim is to explore these sequences with sequence mining to discover serial episodes which are frequent event subsequences that occur frequently in data (Mannila et al., 1997). The domain of melodic analysis is studied in this work : the aim is to highlight the structure of a musical piece by discovering its main melodic patterns. The episodes produced by the miner are examined by a user generally an expert of the domain who have to identify relevant episodes and interpret them. Meanwhile in the interpretation step, the user has to face to a recurrent overabundance of mining's results which makes difficult the identification of interesting ones. There is a real need to adopt a rigorous approach to methodically manage this step and assist the user's work. For this, we propose a visual and interactive approach to assist the interpretation of serial episodes. An Interactive approach to the interpretation of serial episodes We propose to assist the interpretation task by managing combinatorial redundancy in order to focus on relevant episodes. The assistance combines iteratively ranking and filtering useless episodes to help focusing on relevant ones. It has been exemplified in the Transmute prototype, a web-based application enabling user's interaction with events sequences and serial episodes that are represented graphically on a timeline with customisable icons. The interpretation process consists in the main iterative steps : ranking, selection and filtering. The user can choose measures to rank episodes and then select among them to display their occurrences in the sequence. When a choice is made, a filtering process is triggered to clean up other episodes that can no longer be selected following the previous selections of the user. Finally, the user can interpret the episodes by attaching them annotations and record the model resulting from the interpretation into a knowledge base. The ranking of episodes is performed thanks to several objective interestingness measures which estimate the relative importance and compactness of the episodes in the sequence. The first measure is the event coverage indicator which is the number of distinct events of the occurrences of an episode. The second measure is the spreading indicator which is the number of events of the sequence in the time intervals of the episode occurrences. The noise indicator is the difference between these two previous indicators and corresponds to the number of events of the sequence in the time intervals of the episode occurrences. Temporal measures may also be used when event duration are known. The selection of an episode by the user triggers the filtering process which is based on the event coverage of the selected episode. The remaining episodes are examined and occurrences having at least an event in common with the event coverage are discarded. The support is consequently updated and episodes whose support becomes less than the given frequency threshold are discarded. This results in removing combinatorial redundancy around the chosen episode and leads to a gradual diminution of the remaining episodes, allowing to the user a better focus on other episodes

The interplay of linguistic structure and breathing in German spontaneous speech

International audienceThis paper investigates the relation between the linguistic structure of the breath group and breathing kinematics in spontaneous speech. 26 female speakers of German were recorded by means of an Inductance Plethysmograph. The breath group was defined as the interval of speech produced on a single exhalation. For each group several linguistic parameters (number and type of clauses, number of syllables, hesitations) were measured and the associated inhalation was characterized. The average duration of the breath group was ~3.5 s. Most of the breath groups consisted of 1-3 clauses; ~53% started with a matrix clause; ~24% with an embedded clause and ~23% with an incomplete clause (continuation, repetition, hesitation). The inhalation depth and duration varied as a function of the first clause type and with respect to the breath group length, showing some interplay between speech-planning and breathing control. Vocalized hesitations were speaker-specific and came with deeper inhalation. These results are informative for a better understanding of the interplay of speech-planning and breathing control in spontaneous speech. The findings are also relevant for applications in speech therapies and technologies

Changes in breathing while listening to read speech: the effect of reader and speech mode

International audienceThe current paper extends previous work on breathing during speech perception and provides supplementary material regarding the hypothesis that adaptation of breathing during perception "could be a basis for understanding and imitating actions performed by other people" (Paccalin and Jeannerod, 2000). The experiments were designed to test how the differences in reader breathing due to speaker-specific characteristics, or differences induced by changes in loudness level or speech rate influence the listener breathing. Two readers (a male and a female) were pre-recorded while reading short texts with normal and then loud speech (both readers) or slow speech (female only). These recordings were then played back to 48 female listeners. The movements of the rib cage and abdomen were analyzed for both the readers and the listeners. Breathing profiles were characterized by the movement expansion due to inhalation and the duration of the breathing cycle. We found that both loudness and speech rate affected each reader's breathing in different ways. Listener breathing was different when listening to the male or the female reader and to the different speech modes. However, differences in listener breathing were not systematically in the same direction as reader differences. The breathing of listeners was strongly sensitive to the order of presentation of speech mode and displayed some adaptation in the time course of the experiment in some conditions. In contrast to specific alignments of breathing previously observed in face-to-face dialog, no clear evidence for a listener-reader alignment in breathing was found in this purely auditory speech perception task. The results and methods are relevant to the question of the involvement of physiological adaptations in speech perception and to the basic mechanisms of listener-speaker coupling

Is breathing sensitive to the communication partner?

International audienceThis paper investigates breathing profiles in eleven female speakers (subjects) when talking successively with the same two females (partners). Breathing kinematics of the two inter-locutors was recorded synchronously by means of two Induct-ance Plethysmographs. In order to understand the implication of breathing in dialogue, we analyzed changes in breathing pauses according to the main dialogue events (listening, back-channels, turns start and turns continuation). Breathing and syllable rates were also compared among partners and sub-jects. The duration of inhalations and related pauses was re-duced before a turn continuation in comparison to a turn start. The delay between speech offset in a breathing cycle and the onset of the next inhalation increased when a speaker and a listener swap roles as compared to a speaker who continued the turn. This was observed for both partners and subjects. The partners differed in their breathing and articulation rates but the two rates were not clearly correlated. In agreement with previous works, the current study shows that breathing kine-matics is strongly linked to dialogue events. However, it doesn't show any clear effect of partner on speaker's breath-ing. This last result is discussed relative to methodological as-pects

Acquisition de connaissances du domaine d'un système de RàPC : une approche fondée sur l'analyse interactive des échecs d'adaptation --- le système FrakaS

National audienceUn système de raisonnement à partir de cas (RàPC) s'appuie sur des connaissances du domaine, en plus de la base de cas. L'acquisition de nouvelles connaissances du domaine doit améliorer les résultats d'un tel système. Cet article présente une approche pour une telle acquisition de connaissances qui est fondée sur les échecs du système. Le système de RàPC considéré est supposé produire des solutions qui sont cohérentes avec les connaissances du domaine mais mais ces solutions peuvent être incohérentes avec les connaissances de l'expert et cette incohérence constitue une situation d'échec. Grâce à une analyse interactive de cet échec, des connaissances sont acquises qui contribuent à remplir le fossé existant entre les connaissances du système et celles de l'expert. Un autre type d'échec apparait quand la solution présentée par le système n'est que partielle : certaines informations additionnelles sont requises pour pouvoir exploiter cette solution. Une fois de plus, l'interaction avec l'expert entraîne une acquisition de nouvelles connaissances. Cette approche a été implantée dans un prototype, baptisé FrakaS, et testé sur un exemple dans le domaine d'application de l'aide à la décision thérapeutique en cancérologie du sein

Acquisition interactive des connaissances d'adaptation intégrée aux sessions de raisonnement à partir de cas --- Principes, architecture IakA et prototype KayaK

National audienceEn raisonnement à partir de cas, l'acquisition de connaissances au fil des sessions de résolution de problèmes revêt un enjeu particulier ; elle permet l'amélioration progressive des compétences du système sans contrainte pour l'expert. Parmi les différents types de connaissances à acquérir se trouvent les connaissances d'adaptation. L'acquisition opportuniste de connaissances d'adaptation repose sur l'exploitation des interactions entre l'expert et le système. Dans cet article, nous décrivons l'architecture IakA qui guide la mise en application des principes de l'acquisition opportuniste. Nous présentons également KayaK, un prototype développé dans le but de valider l'architecture

Faillure Analysis for Domain Knowledge Acquisition in a Knowledge-Intensive CBR System

International audienceA knowledge-intensive case-based reasoning system has profit of the domain knowledge, together with the case base. Therefore, acquiring new pieces of domain knowledge should improve the accuracy of such a system. This paper presents an approach for knowledge acquisition based on some failures of the system. The CBR system is assumed to produce solutions that are consistent with the domain knowledge but that may be inconsistent with the expert knowledge, and this inconsistency constitutes a failure. Thanks to an interactive analysis of this failure, some knowledge is acquired that contributes to fill the gap from the system knowledge to the expert knowledge. Another type of failures occurs when the solution produced by the system is only partial: some additional pieces of information are required to use it. Once again, an interaction with the expert involves the acquisition of new knowledge. This approach has been implemented in a prototype, called FrakaS, and tested in the application domain of breast cancer treatment decision support

Opportunistic Acquisition of Adaptation Knowledge and Cases - The IakA Approach

International audienceA case-based reasoning system relies on different knowledge containers, including cases and adaptation knowledge. The knowledge acquisition that aims at enriching these containers for the purpose of improving the accuracy of the CBR inference may take place during design, maintenance, and also on-line, during the use of the system. This paper describes IakA, an approach to on-line acquisition of cases and adaptation knowledge based on interactions with an oracle (a kind of “ideal expert”). IakA exploits failures of the CBR inference: when such a failure occurs, the system interacts with the oracle to repair the knowledge base. IakA-NF is a prototype for testing IakA in the domain of numerical functions with an automatic oracle. Two experiments show how IakA opportunistic knowledge acquisition improves the accuracy of the CBR system inferences. The paper also discusses the possible links between IakA and other knowledge acquisition approaches