1,227 research outputs found
An artificial neural network approach for assigning rating judgements to Italian Small Firms
Based on new regulations of Basel II Accord in 2004, banks and financial nstitutions have now the possibility to develop internal rating systems with the aim of correctly udging financial health status of firms. This study analyses the situation of Italian small firms that are difficult to judge because their economic and financial data are often not available. The intend of this work is to propose a simulation framework to give a rating judgements to firms presenting poor financial information. The model assigns a rating judgement that is a simulated counterpart of that done by Bureau van Dijk-K Finance (BvD). Assigning rating score to small firms with problem of poor availability of financial data is really problematic. Nevertheless, in Italy the majority of firms are small and there is not a law that requires to firms to deposit balance-sheet in a detailed form. For this reason the model proposed in this work is a three-layer framework that allows us to assign ating judgements to small enterprises using simple balance-sheet data.rating judgements, artificial neural networks, feature selection
Non-native children speech recognition through transfer learning
This work deals with non-native children's speech and investigates both
multi-task and transfer learning approaches to adapt a multi-language Deep
Neural Network (DNN) to speakers, specifically children, learning a foreign
language. The application scenario is characterized by young students learning
English and German and reading sentences in these second-languages, as well as
in their mother language. The paper analyzes and discusses techniques for
training effective DNN-based acoustic models starting from children native
speech and performing adaptation with limited non-native audio material. A
multi-lingual model is adopted as baseline, where a common phonetic lexicon,
defined in terms of the units of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), is
shared across the three languages at hand (Italian, German and English); DNN
adaptation methods based on transfer learning are evaluated on significant
non-native evaluation sets. Results show that the resulting non-native models
allow a significant improvement with respect to a mono-lingual system adapted
to speakers of the target language
La responsabilité sociale, est-elle une variable influençant les performances d'entreprise?
WP 10/2008; In the last decades, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been deeply studied. Many researchers focused on the best social report form underlining advantages, and they shown that these documents follow more and more often balance-sheets. This work analyses the relation between the writing of social report and both with the profitability and with the technical efficiency. The outcomes suggest that Corporate Social Responsibility improves firm profitability and expands firm market share. Moreover, the relation between the writing of social report and technical efficiency shows that firms interested in Corporate Social Responsibility are also the most efficient, from a technical point of view
DNN adaptation by automatic quality estimation of ASR hypotheses
In this paper we propose to exploit the automatic Quality Estimation (QE) of
ASR hypotheses to perform the unsupervised adaptation of a deep neural network
modeling acoustic probabilities. Our hypothesis is that significant
improvements can be achieved by: i)automatically transcribing the evaluation
data we are currently trying to recognise, and ii) selecting from it a subset
of "good quality" instances based on the word error rate (WER) scores predicted
by a QE component. To validate this hypothesis, we run several experiments on
the evaluation data sets released for the CHiME-3 challenge. First, we operate
in oracle conditions in which manual transcriptions of the evaluation data are
available, thus allowing us to compute the "true" sentence WER. In this
scenario, we perform the adaptation with variable amounts of data, which are
characterised by different levels of quality. Then, we move to realistic
conditions in which the manual transcriptions of the evaluation data are not
available. In this case, the adaptation is performed on data selected according
to the WER scores "predicted" by a QE component. Our results indicate that: i)
QE predictions allow us to closely approximate the adaptation results obtained
in oracle conditions, and ii) the overall ASR performance based on the proposed
QE-driven adaptation method is significantly better than the strong, most
recent, CHiME-3 baseline.Comment: Computer Speech & Language December 201
Automatic Quality Estimation for ASR System Combination
Recognizer Output Voting Error Reduction (ROVER) has been widely used for
system combination in automatic speech recognition (ASR). In order to select
the most appropriate words to insert at each position in the output
transcriptions, some ROVER extensions rely on critical information such as
confidence scores and other ASR decoder features. This information, which is
not always available, highly depends on the decoding process and sometimes
tends to over estimate the real quality of the recognized words. In this paper
we propose a novel variant of ROVER that takes advantage of ASR quality
estimation (QE) for ranking the transcriptions at "segment level" instead of:
i) relying on confidence scores, or ii) feeding ROVER with randomly ordered
hypotheses. We first introduce an effective set of features to compensate for
the absence of ASR decoder information. Then, we apply QE techniques to perform
accurate hypothesis ranking at segment-level before starting the fusion
process. The evaluation is carried out on two different tasks, in which we
respectively combine hypotheses coming from independent ASR systems and
multi-microphone recordings. In both tasks, it is assumed that the ASR decoder
information is not available. The proposed approach significantly outperforms
standard ROVER and it is competitive with two strong oracles that e xploit
prior knowledge about the real quality of the hypotheses to be combined.
Compared to standard ROVER, the abs olute WER improvements in the two
evaluation scenarios range from 0.5% to 7.3%
La responsabilité sociale, est-elle une variable influençant les performances d’entreprise?
In the last decades, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been deeply studied. Many researchers focused on the best social report form underlining advantages, and they shown that these documents follow more and more often balance-sheets. This work analyses the relation between the writing of social report and both with the profitability and with the technical efficiency. The outcomes suggest that Corporate Social Responsibility improves firm profitability and expands firm market share. Moreover, the relation between the writing of social report and technical efficiency shows that firms interested in Corporate Social Responsibility are also the most efficient, from a technical point of view.Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Firm technical efficiency, Firm profitability, Data Envelopment Analysis, Bootstrap
Suspeita de toxoplasmose aguda em gestantes
OBJECTIVE: To determine the prevalence of reagent serology for suspected acute toxoplasmosis in pregnant women and to describe clinical, laboratory and therapeutic profiles of mothers and their children. METHODS: A retrospective study was conducted with IgM-anti-Toxoplasma gondii-reagent pregnant women and their children who attended the public health system in the state of Paraná, Southern Brazil, from January 2001 to December 2003. Information were obtained from clinical, laboratory (ELISA IgM/IgG) and ultrasonographic data and from interviews with the mothers. To test the homogeneity of the IgM indices in relation to the treatment used, the Pearson's Chi-square test was applied. Comparisons were considered significant at a 5% level. RESULTS: Two hundred and ninety (1.0%) cases of suspected IgM-reagent infection were documented, with a prevalence of 10.7 IgM-reagent women per 1,000 births. Prenatal care started within the first 12 weeks for 214/290; 146/204 were asymptomatic. Frequent complaints included headaches, visual disturbance and myalgia. Ultrasonography revealed abnormalities in 13 of 204 pregnancies. Chemoprophylaxis was administered to 112/227; a single ELISA test supported most decisions to begin treatment. Pregnant women with IgM indices =2.000 tended to be treated more often. Among exposed children, 44/208 were serologically followed up and all were IgG-reagent, and three IgM-reagent cases showed clinical symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: The existence of pregnant women with laboratorially suspected acute toxoplasmosis who were not properly followed up, and of fetuses that were not adequately monitored, shows that basic aspects of the prenatal care are not being systematically observed. There is need of implementing a surveillance system of pregnant women and their children exposed to T. gondii.OBJETIVO: Determinar a prevalĂŞncia de gestantes com sorologia reagente suspeita de toxoplasmose aguda e descrever as variáveis maternas e do concepto relacionadas ao perfil clĂnico, laboratorial e terapĂŞutico. MÉTODOS: Estudo retrospectivo com gestantes IgM anti-Toxoplasma gondii reagentes e conceptos atendidos em serviço pĂşblico de saĂşde do Paraná, de janeiro/2001-dezembro/2003. Foram obtidas informações a partir de dados dos registros clĂnicos, laboratoriais (ELISA IgM/IgG), ultrassonográficos e de entrevista materna. Para testar a homogeneidade dos indices de IgM em relação ao tratamento usado, aplicou-se o qui-quadrado de Pearson. O nĂvel de significância adotado foi de 5%. RESULTADOS: Ocorreram 290 casos (1,0%) IgM reagentes, evidenciando prevalĂŞncia de 10,7 gestantes com sorologia reagente a cada 1.000 nascimentos. Duzentos e quatorze de 290 gestantes iniciaram o prĂ©-natal atĂ© a 12ÂŞ semana de gestação; 146/204 foram assintomáticas; cefalĂ©ia, distĂşrbios visuais e mialgia foram queixas freqĂĽentes; 13/204 gestantes apresentaram anormalidades ao ultrassom; 112/227 gestantes receberam quimioprofilaxia; um Ăşnico teste ELISA apoiou a maioria das tomadas de decisĂŁo para a quimioprofilaxia. Houve tendĂŞncia em tratar gestantes com Ăndices de IgM=2.000. Dentre as crianças expostas, 44/208 tiveram algum acompanhamento sorolĂłgico, das quais todas foram IgG reagentes e trĂŞs casos IgM reagentes apresentaram manifestações clĂnicas. CONCLUSĂ•ES: A existĂŞncia de gestantes com suspeita laboratorial de toxoplasmose aguda nĂŁo devidamente investigada e de conceptos sem monitoração adequada evidenciam que aspectos fundamentais da assistĂŞncia prĂ©-natal nĂŁo estĂŁo sendo sistematicamente observados. Aponta-se a necessidade de implementar o sistema de vigilância para gestantes e crianças expostas ao T. gondii
the localization of pharmaceutical clinical research in europe
Background: Clinical research is a specific phase of the production process in the pharmaceutical industry in which companies test candidate drugs on patients in order to collect clinical evidence about safety and effectiveness.Objective: This paper is an operational research which aimed to support the hypothesis that pharmaceutical clinical research is like any other production process which could be localized where the cost is most competitive. In other words, this work aimed to demonstrate that the localization process of this specific phase of the pharmaceutical industry's R&D is based on the price of clinical evidence.Methods: Considering Europe and taking panel data into account, an efficiency frontier through data envelopment analysis (DEA) was estimated. The efficiency of countries in maximizing the number of innovative medical treatments, given their available resources was estimated. Afterwards, focusing on European macro-regions, authors analyzed whether a significant concentration of clinical research exists.Results: Results suggest that, taking the expected principal investigators' fee into account, Southeastern Europe and Central Eastern Europe are the most attractive macro-regions for the pharmaceutical industry's foreign direct investments in clinical research.Conclusion: The results of the proposed operational research cannot reject the suggested evolution of the pharmaceutical industry's clinical research. In other words, results confirm the localization process of the testing phase in East Europe, where the expected principal investigators' fee is more competitive
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