Extraction and Analysis of Dynamic Conversational Networks from TV Series

Identifying and characterizing the dynamics of modern tv series subplots is an open problem. One way is to study the underlying social network of interactions between the characters. Standard dynamic network extraction methods rely on temporal integration, either over the whole considered period, or as a sequence of several time-slices. However, they turn out to be inappropriate in the case of tv series, because the scenes shown onscreen alternatively focus on parallel storylines, and do not necessarily respect a traditional chronology. In this article, we introduce Narrative Smoothing, a novel network extraction method taking advantage of the plot properties to solve some of their limitations. We apply our method to a corpus of 3 popular series, and compare it to both standard approaches. Narrative smoothing leads to more relevant observations when it comes to the characterization of the protagonists and their relationships, confirming its appropriateness to model the intertwined storylines constituting the plots.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1602.0781

Semantic and Visual Similarities for Efficient Knowledge Transfer in CNN Training

International audienceIn recent years, representation learning approaches have disrupted many multimedia computing tasks. Among those approaches, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have notably reached human level expertise on some constrained image classification tasks. Nonetheless, training CNNs from scratch for new task or simply new data turns out to be complex and time-consuming. Recently, transfer learning has emerged as an effective methodology for adapting pre-trained CNNs to new data and classes, by only retraining the last classification layer. This paper focuses on improving this process, in order to better transfer knowledge between CNN architectures for faster trainings in the case of fine tuning for image classification. This is achieved by combining and transfering supplementary weights, based on similarity considerations between source and target classes. The study includes a comparison between semantic and content-based similarities, and highlights increased initial performances and training speed, along with superior long term performances when limited training samples are available

M2H-GAN: A GAN-based Mapping from Machine to Human Transcripts for Speech Understanding

International audienceDeep learning is at the core of recent spoken language understanding (SLU) related tasks. More precisely, deep neu-ral networks (DNNs) drastically increased the performances of SLU systems, and numerous architectures have been proposed. In the real-life context of theme identification of telephone conversations , it is common to hold both a human, manual (TRS) and an automatically transcribed (ASR) versions of the conversations. Nonetheless, and due to production constraints, only the ASR transcripts are considered to build automatic classi-fiers. TRS transcripts are only used to measure the performances of ASR systems. Moreover, the recent performances in term of classification accuracy, obtained by DNN related systems are close to the performances reached by humans, and it becomes difficult to further increase the performances by only considering the ASR transcripts. This paper proposes to dis-tillates the TRS knowledge available during the training phase within the ASR representation, by using a new generative adver-sarial network called M2H-GAN to generate a TRS-like version of an ASR document, to improve the theme identification performances