New bilingual speech databases for audio diarization

Abstract This paper describes the process of collecting and recording two new bilingual speech databases in Spanish and Basque. They are designed primarily for speaker diarization in two different application domains: broadcast news audio and recorded meetings. First, both databases have been manually segmented. Next, several diarization experiments have been carried out in order to evaluate them. Our baseline speaker diarization system has been applied to both databases with around 30% of DER for broadcast news audio and 40% of DER for recorded meetings. Also, the behavior of the system when different languages are used by the same speaker has been tested

LSTM based voice conversion for laryngectomees

This paper describes a voice conversion system designed withthe aim of improving the intelligibility and pleasantness of oe-sophageal voices. Two different systems have been built, oneto transform the spectral magnitude and another one for thefundamental frequency, both based on DNNs. Ahocoder hasbeen used to extract the spectral information (mel cepstral co-efficients) and a specific pitch extractor has been developed tocalculate the fundamental frequency of the oesophageal voices.The cepstral coefficients are converted by means of an LSTMnetwork. The conversion of the intonation curve is implementedthrough two different LSTM networks, one dedicated to thevoiced unvoiced detection and another one for the predictionof F0 from the converted cepstral coefficients. The experi-ments described here involve conversion from one oesophagealspeaker to a specific healthy voice. The intelligibility of thesignals has been measured with a Kaldi based ASR system. Apreference test has been implemented to evaluate the subjectivepreference of the obtained converted voices comparing themwith the original oesophageal voice. The results show that spec-tral conversion improves ASR while restoring the intonation ispreferred by human listenersThis work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministryof Economy and Competitiveness with FEDER support (RE-STORE project, TEC2015-67163-C2-1-R), the Basque Govern-ment (BerbaOla project, KK-2018/00014) and from the Euro-pean Unions H2020 research and innovation programme un-der the Marie Curie European Training Network ENRICH(675324)

Genetic Analysis of Hematological Parameters in Incipient Lines of the Collaborative Cross

Hematological parameters, including red and white blood cell counts and hemoglobin concentration, are widely used clinical indicators of health and disease. These traits are tightly regulated in healthy individuals and are under genetic control. Mutations in key genes that affect hematological parameters have important phenotypic consequences, including multiple variants that affect susceptibility to malarial disease. However, most variation in hematological traits is continuous and is presumably influenced by multiple loci and variants with small phenotypic effects. We used a newly developed mouse resource population, the Collaborative Cross (CC), to identify genetic determinants of hematological parameters. We surveyed the eight founder strains of the CC and performed a mapping study using 131 incipient lines of the CC. Genome scans identified quantitative trait loci for several hematological parameters, including mean red cell volume (Chr 7 and Chr 14), white blood cell count (Chr 18), percent neutrophils/lymphocytes (Chr 11), and monocyte number (Chr 1). We used evolutionary principles and unique bioinformatics resources to reduce the size of candidate intervals and to view functional variation in the context of phylogeny. Many quantitative trait loci regions could be narrowed sufficiently to identify a small number of promising candidate genes. This approach not only expands our knowledge about hematological traits but also demonstrates the unique ability of the CC to elucidate the genetic architecture of complex traits

Carbon-sensitive pedotransfer functions for plant available water

Currently accepted pedotransfer functions show negligible effect of management-induced changes to soil organic carbon (SOC) on plant available water holding capacity (θAWHC), while some studies show the ability to substantially increase θAWHC through management. The Soil Health Institute\u27s North America Project to Evaluate Soil Health Measurements measured water content at field capacity using intact soil cores across 124 long-term research sites that contained increases in SOC as a result of management treatments such as reduced tillage and cover cropping. Pedotransfer functions were created for volumetric water content at field capacity (θFC) and permanent wilting point (θPWP). New pedotransfer functions had predictions of θAWHC that were similarly accurate compared with Saxton and Rawls when tested on samples from the National Soil Characterization database. Further, the new pedotransfer functions showed substantial effects of soil calcareousness and SOC on θAWHC. For an increase in SOC of 10 g kg–1 (1%) in noncalcareous soils, an average increase in θAWHC of 3.0 mm 100 mm–1 soil (0.03 m3 m–3) on average across all soil texture classes was found. This SOC related increase in θAWHC is about double previous estimates. Calcareous soils had an increase in θAWHC of 1.2 mm 100 mm–1 soil associated with a 10 g kg–1 increase in SOC, across all soil texture classes. New equations can aid in quantifying benefits of soil management practices that increase SOC and can be used to model the effect of changes in management on drought resilience

Linking soil microbial community structure to potential carbon mineralization: A continental scale assessment of reduced tillage

Potential carbon mineralization (Cmin) is a commonly used indicator of soil health, with greater Cmin values interpreted as healthier soil. While Cmin values are typically greater in agricultural soils managed with minimal physical disturbance, the mechanisms driving the increases remain poorly understood. This study assessed bacterial and archaeal community structure and potential microbial drivers of Cmin in soils maintained under various degrees of physical disturbance. Potential carbon mineralization, 16S rRNA sequences, and soil characterization data were collected as part of the North American Project to Evaluate Soil Health Measurements (NAPESHM). Results showed that type of cropping system, intensity of physical disturbance, and soil pH influenced microbial sensitivity to physical disturbance. Furthermore, 28% of amplicon sequence variants (ASVs), which were important in modeling Cmin, were enriched under soils managed with minimal physical disturbance. Sequences identified as enriched under minimal disturbance and important for modeling Cmin, were linked to organisms which could produce extracellular polymeric substances and contained metabolic strategies suited for tolerating environmental stressors. Understanding how physical disturbance shapes microbial communities across climates and inherent soil properties and drives changes in Cmin provides the context necessary to evaluate management impacts on standardized measures of soil microbial activity

A genetic history of the pre-contact Caribbean

Humans settled the Caribbean about 6,000 years ago, and ceramic use and intensified agriculture mark a shift from the Archaic to the Ceramic Age at around 2,500 years ago1,2,3. Here we report genome-wide data from 174 ancient individuals from The Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (collectively, Hispaniola), Puerto Rico, Curaçao and Venezuela, which we co-analysed with 89 previously published ancient individuals. Stone-tool-using Caribbean people, who first entered the Caribbean during the Archaic Age, derive from a deeply divergent population that is closest to Central and northern South American individuals; contrary to previous work4, we find no support for ancestry contributed by a population related to North American individuals. Archaic-related lineages were >98% replaced by a genetically homogeneous ceramic-using population related to speakers of languages in the Arawak family from northeast South America; these people moved through the Lesser Antilles and into the Greater Antilles at least 1,700 years ago, introducing ancestry that is still present. Ancient Caribbean people avoided close kin unions despite limited mate pools that reflect small effective population sizes, which we estimate to be a minimum of 500–1,500 and a maximum of 1,530–8,150 individuals on the combined islands of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola in the dozens of generations before the individuals who we analysed lived. Census sizes are unlikely to be more than tenfold larger than effective population sizes, so previous pan-Caribbean estimates of hundreds of thousands of people are too large5,6. Confirming a small and interconnected Ceramic Age population7, we detect 19 pairs of cross-island cousins, close relatives buried around 75 km apart in Hispaniola and low genetic differentiation across islands. Genetic continuity across transitions in pottery styles reveals that cultural changes during the Ceramic Age were not driven by migration of genetically differentiated groups from the mainland, but instead reflected interactions within an interconnected Caribbean world1,8.This work was supported by a grant from the National Geographic Society to M. Pateman to facilitate analysis of skeletal material from The Bahamas and by a grant from the Italian ‘Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation’ (Italian archaeological, anthropological and ethnological missions abroad, DGPSP Ufficio VI). D.R. was funded by NSF HOMINID grant BCS-1032255, NIH (NIGMS) grant GM100233, the Paul Allen Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation grant 61220 and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.Peer reviewe

Técnicas de mejora del rendimiento de los sistemas de diarización de locutores

201 p.El objetivo de la diarización es detectar los cambios de locutor en una grabación e identificar qué segmentos de voz corresponden a un mismo locutor, respondiendo a la pregunta ¿quién habló cuándo¿.El trabajo realizado en esta tesis abarca diferentes aspectos relacionados con el proceso de diarización de locutores, centrando el esfuerzo en los problemas comunes a los diferentes campos de aplicación.En primer lugar, se han recopilado dos nuevas bases de datos que permitirán el desarrollo y la implementación de nuevos sistemas de diarización en los dos principales ámbitos de aplicación. Además, se han diseñado dos nuevas técnicas de segmentación de audio, refrendadas con éxito en distintas campañas de evaluación organizadas por la Red Temática en Tecnologías del Habla. Se ha desarrollado un método de fusión de etiquetas que tiene en cuenta el desequilibrio entre clases, habitual en distintas áreas del procesado de la voz, como son la segmentación de audio, el reconocimiento de emociones o el reconocimiento y verificación de locutores. En cuanto a la tarea de segmentación de locutores, se ha introducido en esta tesis una técnica de detección de cambios de turno basada en el análisis trama a trama, que permite extender el funcionamiento online a los sistemas de diarización. Por último, se ha propuesto una técnica de mejora de la diarización basada en la identificación y reagrupamiento de clusters pertenecientes a un mismo locutor

Técnicas de mejora del rendimiento de los sistemas de diarización de locutores

201 p.El objetivo de la diarización es detectar los cambios de locutor en una grabación e identificar qué segmentos de voz corresponden a un mismo locutor, respondiendo a la pregunta ¿quién habló cuándo¿.El trabajo realizado en esta tesis abarca diferentes aspectos relacionados con el proceso de diarización de locutores, centrando el esfuerzo en los problemas comunes a los diferentes campos de aplicación.En primer lugar, se han recopilado dos nuevas bases de datos que permitirán el desarrollo y la implementación de nuevos sistemas de diarización en los dos principales ámbitos de aplicación. Además, se han diseñado dos nuevas técnicas de segmentación de audio, refrendadas con éxito en distintas campañas de evaluación organizadas por la Red Temática en Tecnologías del Habla. Se ha desarrollado un método de fusión de etiquetas que tiene en cuenta el desequilibrio entre clases, habitual en distintas áreas del procesado de la voz, como son la segmentación de audio, el reconocimiento de emociones o el reconocimiento y verificación de locutores. En cuanto a la tarea de segmentación de locutores, se ha introducido en esta tesis una técnica de detección de cambios de turno basada en el análisis trama a trama, que permite extender el funcionamiento online a los sistemas de diarización. Por último, se ha propuesto una técnica de mejora de la diarización basada en la identificación y reagrupamiento de clusters pertenecientes a un mismo locutor