Predictive success, partial truth and skeptical realism

Realists argue that mature theories enjoying predictive success are approximately and partially true, and that the parts of the theory necessary to this success are retained through theory-change and worthy of belief. I examine the paradigmatic case of the novel prediction of a white spot in the shadow of a circular object, drawn from Fresnel's wave theory of light by Poisson in 1819. It reveals two problems in this defence of realism: predictive success needs theoretical idealizations and fictions on the one hand, and may be obtained by using different parts of the same theory on the other hand. I maintain that these two problems are not limited to the case of the white spot, but common features of predictive success. It shows that the no-miracle argument by itself cannot prove more than a \textit{skeptical realism}, the claim that we cannot know which parts of theories are true. I conclude by examining if Hacking's manipulability arguments can be of any help to go beyond this position

English Broadcast News Speech Recognition by Humans and Machines

With recent advances in deep learning, considerable attention has been given to achieving automatic speech recognition performance close to human performance on tasks like conversational telephone speech (CTS) recognition. In this paper we evaluate the usefulness of these proposed techniques on broadcast news (BN), a similar challenging task. We also perform a set of recognition measurements to understand how close the achieved automatic speech recognition results are to human performance on this task. On two publicly available BN test sets, DEV04F and RT04, our speech recognition system using LSTM and residual network based acoustic models with a combination of n-gram and neural network language models performs at 6.5% and 5.9% word error rate. By achieving new performance milestones on these test sets, our experiments show that techniques developed on other related tasks, like CTS, can be transferred to achieve similar performance. In contrast, the best measured human recognition performance on these test sets is much lower, at 3.6% and 2.8% respectively, indicating that there is still room for new techniques and improvements in this space, to reach human performance levels.Comment: \copyright 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other work

Expressão e contenção da emoção em quatrevingt-treize: a figura sublime

A análise de Quatrevingt-treize, de Victor Hugo (1874), que propomos tem por base a forma como a contenção e a expressão das emoções se articulam nesta obra, contribuindo para a caracterização das diferentes personagens, ou dos diferentes tipos de personagem, nela existentes

La structure de 'La Mort le Roi Artu'

Il existe maintes versions littéraires de la mort du roi Arthur avant les œuvres les mieux connues, celles de Malory et Tennyson. Cet article examine une des versions de l'histoire dans la littérature française médiévale, l'ouvrage narratif anonyme du treizième siècle "La Mort le Roi Artu", troisième section du "Lancelot en prose", qui fait partie de la Vulgate de la "Matière de Bretagne" française. Nous commentons quelques lignes thématiques importantes de l'ouvrage, avec une approche à son style et son structure du point de vue de la narratologie. ___________________________________________________________________________ There are many literary versions of the death of King Arthur before the well-known works by Malory and by Tennyson. This paper is concerned with one of the medieval French versions of the story, the anonymous 13th-century narrative "La Mort le roi Artu," the third section of the "Lancelot en prose," and part of the so-called Vulgate version of the French 'matière de Bretagne'. This paper comments some thematic concerns of the work and analyses some aspects of its structure and style from a narratological viewpoint. Note: Downloadable document is in French

Décaper les vieux romans : voisinages corrosifs dans un manuscrit du XIIIe siècle (Chantilly, Condé 472)

Dès ses plus anciennes manifestations, la littérature narrative qui prend le nom de « roman » se donne comme un jeu d’échos et de réponses entre les textes. L’étude des collections de manuscrits permet de saisir ces jeux intertextuels en contexte, notamment à travers l’organisation de codex qui témoignent de la réception du roman médiéval par les copistes médiévaux eux-mêmes. La composition du manuscrit de Chantilly (Condé 472), où se côtoient romans parodiques et romans canoniques (notamment Érec, Yvain et Lancelot de Chrétien de Troyes), illustre le travail de scribes de toute évidence parfaitement conscients du ludisme des textes qu’ils recopiaient et qui s’assuraient, à travers la mise en recueil, de mettre en regard ce que l’on appellerait, en termes genettiens, le texte parodique et sa source hypotextuelle. La mise en recueil donne cependant un sens positif à cette réflexion critique sur l’art du roman : elle ne se contente pas d’organiser la série de romans parodiques de façon à miner la crédibilité du monde arthurien et, ce faisant, de réorienter l’éclairage jeté sur les romans de Chrétien de Troyes, elle propose la lecture allégorique comme voie de renouvellement. Avec les premières branches du Perlesvaus, elle explore les possibilités d’une lecture édifiante de la légende arthurienne, dans un monde où l’humour le cède à l’horreur. Cette voie, abandonnée avant l’heureuse conclusion, est reprise dans un tout autre registre avec le Roman de Renart. La position finale attribuée aux branches du Roman de Renart et le choix de branches où l’enjeu rhétorique et herméneutique est clairement exprimé laissent croire que le scribe qui est derrière l’agencement du manuscrit a trouvé dans les aventures du goupil le juste équilibre entre parodie et allégorie capable de justifier pleinement l’aventure paradoxale du roman antiromanesque

Creating a data collection for evaluating rich speech retrieval

We describe the development of a test collection for the investigation of speech retrieval beyond identification of relevant content. This collection focuses on satisfying user information needs for queries associated with specific types of speech acts. The collection is based on an archive of the Internet video from Internet video sharing platform (blip.tv), and was provided by the MediaEval benchmarking initiative. A crowdsourcing approach was used to identify segments in the video data which contain speech acts, to create a description of the video containing the act and to generate search queries designed to refind this speech act. We describe and reflect on our experiences with crowdsourcing this test collection using the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. We highlight the challenges of constructing this dataset, including the selection of the data source, design of the crowdsouring task and the specification of queries and relevant items

DCU search runs at MediaEval 2012: search and hyperlinking task

We describe the runs for our participation in the Search sub-task of the Search and Hyperlinking Task at MediaEval 2012. Our runs are designed to form a retrieval baseline by using time-based segmentation of audio transcripts incorporating pause information and a sliding window to define the retrieval segments boundaries with a standard language modelling information retrieval strategy. Using this baseline system runs based on transcripts provided by LIUM were better for all evaluation metrics, than those using transcripts provided by LIMSI

Identification of Non-Linguistic Speech Features

Over the last decade technological advances have been made which enable us to envision real-world applications of speech technologies. It is possible to foresee applications where the spoken query is to be recognized without even prior knowledge of the language being spoken, for example, information centers in public places such as train stations and airports. Other applications may require accurate identification of the speaker for security reasons, including control of access to confidential information or for telephone-based transactions. Ideally, the speaker's identity can be verified continually during the transaction, in a manner completely transparent to the user. With these views in mind, this paper presents a unified approach to identifying non-linguistic speech features from the recorded signal using phone-based acoustic likelihoods. This technique is shown to be effective for text-independent language, sex, and speaker identification and can enable better and more friendly human-machine interaction. With 2s of speech, the language can be identified with better than 99 % accuracy. Error in sex-identification is about 1% on a per-sentence basis, and speaker identification accuracies of 98.5 % on TIMIT (168 speakers) and 99.2 % on BREF (65 speakers), were obtained with one utterance per speaker, and 100 % with 2 utterances for both corpora. An experiment using unsupervised adaptation for speaker identification on the 168 TIMIT speakers had the same identification accuracies obtained with supervised adaptation

Predictive success, partial truth and skeptical realism

Realists argue that mature theories enjoying predictive success are approximately and partially true, and that the parts of the theory necessary to this success are retained through theory-change and worthy of belief. I examine the paradigmatic case of the novel prediction of a white spot in the shadow of a circular object, drawn from Fresnel's wave theory of light by Poisson in 1819. It reveals two problems in this defence of realism: predictive success needs theoretical idealizations and fictions on the one hand, and may be obtained by using different parts of the same theory on the other hand. I maintain that these two problems are not limited to the case of the white spot, but common features of predictive success. It shows that the no-miracle argument by itself cannot prove more than a \textit{skeptical realism}, the claim that we cannot know which parts of theories are true. I conclude by examining if Hacking's manipulability arguments can be of any help to go beyond this position