A Cascaded Broadcast News Highlighter

This paper presents a fully automatic news skimming system which takes a broadcast news audio stream and provides the user with the segmented, structured and highlighted transcript. This constitutes a system with three different, cascading stages: converting the audio stream to text using an automatic speech recogniser, segmenting into utterances and stories and finally determining which utterance should be highlighted using a saliency score. Each stage must operate on the erroneous output from the previous stage in the system; an effect which is naturally amplified as the data progresses through the processing stages. We present a large corpus of transcribed broadcast news data enabling us to investigate to which degree information worth highlighting survives this cascading of processes. Both extrinsic and intrinsic experimental results indicate that mistakes in the story boundary detection has a strong impact on the quality of highlights, whereas erroneous utterance boundaries cause only minor problems. Further, the difference in transcription quality does not affect the overall performance greatly

Cranberry juice and combinations of its organic acids are effective against experimental urinary tract infection

The antibacterial effect of cranberry juice and the organic acids therein on infection by uropathogenic Escherichia coli was studied in an experimental mouse model of urinary tract infection (UTI). Reduced bacterial counts were found in the bladder (P < 0.01) of mice drinking fresh cranberry juice. Commercially available cranberry juice cocktail also significantly reduced (P < 0.01) bacterial populations in the bladder, as did the hydrophilic fraction of cranberry juice (P < 0.05). Quinic, malic, shikimic, and citric acid, the preponderant organic acids in cranberry juice, were tested in combination and individually. The four organic acids also decreased bacterial levels in the bladder when administered together (P < 0.001), and so did the combination of malic plus citric acid (P < 0.01) and malic plus quinic acid (P < 0.05). The other tested combinations of the organic acids, and the acids administered singly, did not have any effect in the UTI model. Apparently, the antibacterial effect of the organic acids from cranberry juice on UTI can be obtained by administering a combination of malic acid and either citric or quinic acid. This study show for the first time that cranberry juice reduce E. coli colonization of the bladder in an experimental mouse model of urinary tract infection and that the organic acids are active agents

Automatic detection of expressed emotion from Five-Minute Speech Samples:Challenges and opportunities

Research into clinical applications of speech-based emotion recognition (SER)technologies has been steadily increasing over the past few years. One such potential application is the automatic recognition of expressed emotion (EE) components within family environments. The identification of EE is highly important as they have been linked with a range of adverse life events. Manual coding of these events requires time-consuming specialist training, amplifying the need for automated approaches. Herein we describe an automated machine learning approach for determining the degree of warmth, a key component of EE, from acoustic and text natural language features. Our dataset of 52 recorded interviews is taken from recordings, collected over 20 years ago, from a nationally representative birth cohort of British twin children, and was manually coded for EE by two researchers (inter-rater reliability 0.84–0.90). We demonstrate that the degree of warmth can be predicted with an F1-score of 64.7% despite working with audio recordings of highly variable quality. Our highly promising results suggest that machine learning may be able to assist in the coding of EE in the near future