Unsupervised cross-lingual speaker adaptation for HMM-based speech synthesis using two-pass decision tree construction

This paper demonstrates how unsupervised cross-lingual adaptation of HMM-based speech synthesis models may be performed without explicit knowledge of the adaptation data language. A two-pass decision tree construction technique is deployed for this purpose. Using parallel translated datasets, cross-lingual and intralingual adaptation are compared in a controlled manner. Listener evaluations reveal that the proposed method delivers performance approaching that of unsupervised intralingual adaptation

The Tellus Airborne Geophysical Survey of Northern Ireland. Final results

The Tellus airborne geophysical survey of Northern Ireland was conducted over a two year period. Measurements from a fixed-wing aircraft operating at 56 m include magnetic (gradiometer), radiometric and frequency-domain electromagnetic. The survey comprises over 80,000 line-km of coverage and was completed in two phases (2005 and 2006). The large geographical scale and two year duration have combined to raise interesting questions regarding data processing and seasonal adjustments. The radiometric and electromagnetic data sets are completely new for N.Ireland, whereas the magnetic data set is significantly better than the existing one. The preliminary results have excited the interest of the planning, mineral and environmental communities

Comparing human and automatic speech recognition in a perceptual restoration experiment

Speech that has been distorted by introducing spectral or temporal gaps is still perceived as continuous and complete by human listeners, so long as the gaps are filled with additive noise of sufficient intensity. When such perceptual restoration occurs, the speech is also more intelligible compared to the case in which noise has not been added in the gaps. This observation has motivated so-called 'missing data' systems for automatic speech recognition (ASR), but there have been few attempts to determine whether such systems are a good model of perceptual restoration in human listeners. Accordingly, the current paper evaluates missing data ASR in a perceptual restoration task. We evaluated two systems that use a new approach to bounded marginalisation in the cepstral domain, and a bounded conditional mean imputation method. Both methods model available speech information as a clean-speech posterior distribution that is subsequently passed to an ASR system. The proposed missing data ASR systems were evaluated using distorted speech, in which spectro-temporal gaps were optionally filled with additive noise. Speech recognition performance of the proposed systems was compared against a baseline ASR system, and with human speech recognition performance on the same task. We conclude that missing data methods improve speech recognition performance in a manner that is consistent with perceptual restoration in human listeners

Introduction and assessment of orthognathic information clinic

Background/Objectives: Orthognathic treatment is routine practice to rehabilitate severe malocclusions and dentofacial deformities. Because orthognathic treatment is elective, patient’s involvement in deciding whether to proceed with treatment is vital. Interaction and communication between patient and treating team plays a key role in achieving post-treatment satisfaction. To achieve satisfaction, an orthognathic ‘information clinic’ for prospective orthognathic patients was established at Oral and Maxillofacial Unit, Tampere University Hospital, Finland. ‘Information clinic’ includes short talks with power-point presentation given by orthodontist, oral hygienist, oral and maxillofacial surgeon, psychologist, and previous patient. Aim of the study was to set up an ‘information clinic’ and, more specifically, 1. to assess patients’ opinions on the ‘clinic’ during pilot phase (2013–14) and 2. to analyse general statistics during the first 3 years (2013–16). / Methods: During the pilot phase, patient opinions, based on voluntary questionnaire, were obtained from 85 people. General data were collected for the clinics run in 2013–16. / Results: Seventy-two per cent of respondents reported the information provided to help in their decision-making to proceed/not proceed with treatment. Majority considered the information about the surgical aspects and meeting patient who had undergone orthognathic treatment to be the most important part of the clinic. Between March 2013 and 2016, 290 prospective orthognathic patients were invited to 29 ‘information clinics’. One hundred and ninety-four patients attended, of whom 137 were female and 57 male (age range 15–67 years). / Conclusions: The questionnaire and verbal feedback from the patients was positive; hence, the ‘information clinic’ is now offered as a routine process to all prospective orthognathic patients in our clinic

Methods and algorithms for unsupervised learning of morphology

This is an accepted manuscript of a chapter published by Springer in Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8403 in 2014 available online: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54906-9_15 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.This paper is a survey of methods and algorithms for unsupervised learning of morphology. We provide a description of the methods and algorithms used for morphological segmentation from a computational linguistics point of view. We survey morphological segmentation methods covering methods based on MDL (minimum description length), MLE (maximum likelihood estimation), MAP (maximum a posteriori), parametric and non-parametric Bayesian approaches. A review of the evaluation schemes for unsupervised morphological segmentation is also provided along with a summary of evaluation results on the Morpho Challenge evaluations.Published versio

The JAC airborne EM system : AEM-05

This paper describes the airborne electromagnetic (AEM) system operated by the Joint Airborne geoscience Capability (JAC), a partnership between the Finnish and British Geological Surveys. The system is a component of a 3-in-1, fixed-wing facility acquiring magnetic gradiometer and full spectrum radiometric data alongside the wing-tip, frequency-domain AEM measurements. The AEM system has recently (2005) been upgraded from 2 to 4 frequencies and now provides a bandwidth from 900 Hz to 25 kHz. The fixed-wing configuration of 4 dual vertical coplanar coils, offers a high signal/noise by virtue of the wingspan separation of the sensors. This unique configuration allows 3-in-1 surveys to be successfully performed at a variety of survey elevations when regulatory conditions are imposed. Its deployment on a twin-engine aircraft also permits low altitude surveying in countries, such as the UK, where this is a requirement. The development of the new AEM-05 system has been incremental and its history can be traced back over five decades. The AEM data acquired in the Finnish National Mapping project, and across northern Europe, have been used extensively in mineral exploration. More recent projects have investigated the application of the data to environmental, hydrogeological and land quality issues. These studies have been enhanced by reducing the flight line separation from 200 m (the national high-resolution scale) to 50 m. Our surveys also increasingly involve the application of AEM across populated areas often with extensive infrastructure. Additional secondary instrumentation has been introduced to provide an increased understanding of the data and the AEM responses observed. The secondary systems include an accurate, high sampling rate laser altimeter, a downward-looking digital camera to record the flight path, a 50/60 Hz power line monitor and a GPS gyroscope. The paper is intended as an overview and provides descriptions of the new AEM system, the secondary systems now employed and some of the software used to provide accurate and levelled AEM data. Recent applications of the system are reviewed and the challenging nature of the new subsurface information being revealed is demonstrated