VOCE Corpus: Ecologically Collected Speech Annotated with Physiological and Psychological Stress Assessments.

Public speaking is a widely requested professional skill, and at the same time an activity that causes one of the most common adult phobias (Miller and Stone, 2009). It is also known that the study of stress under laboratory conditions, as it is most commonly done, may provide only limited ecological validity (Wilhelm and Grossman, 2010). Previously, we introduced an inter-disciplinary methodology to enable collecting a large amount of recordings under consistent conditions (Aguiar et al., 2013). This paper introduces the VOCE corpus of speech annotated with stress indicators under naturalistic public speaking (PS) settings. The novelty of this corpus is that the recordings are carried out in objectively stressful PS situations, as recommended in (Zanstra and Johnston, 2011). The current database contains a total of 38 recordings, 13 of which contain full psychological and physiologic annotation. We show that the collected recordings validate the assumptions of the methodology, namely that participants experience stress during the PS events. We describe the various metrics that can be used for physiologic and psychological annotation, and we characterise the sample collected so far, providing evidence that demographics do not affect the relevant psychological or physiologic annotation. The collection activities are on-going, and we expect to increase the number of complete recordings in the corpus to 30 by June 2014

Multilingual speech recognition for the elderly: The AALFred personal life assistant

The PaeLife project is a European industry-academia collaboration in the framework of the Ambient Assisted Living Joint Programme (AAL JP), with a goal of developing a multimodal, multilingual virtual personal life assistant to help senior citizens remain active and socially integrated. Speech is one of the key interaction modalities of AALFred, the Windows application developed in the project; the application can be controlled using speech input in four European languages: French, Hungarian, Polish and Portuguese. This paper briefly presents the personal life assistant and then focuses on the speech-related achievements of the project. These include the collection, transcription and annotation of large corpora of elderly speech, the development of automatic speech recognisers optimised for elderly speakers, a speech modality component that can easily be reused in other applications, and an automatic grammar translation service that allows for fast expansion of the automatic speech recognition functionality to new languages.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Prototype System for Selective Dissemination of Broadcast News in European Portuguese

This paper describes ongoing work on selective dissemination of broadcast news. Our pipeline system includes several modules: audio preprocessing, speech recognition, and topic segmentation and indexation. The main goal of this work is to study the impact of earlier errors in the last modules. The impact of audio preprocessing errors is quite small on the speech recognition module, but quite significant in terms of topic segmentation. On the other hand, the impact of speech recognition errors on the topic segmentation and indexation modules is almost negligible. The diagnostic of the errors in these modules is a very important step for the improvement of the prototype of a media watch system described in this paper

Hot Spring Water Traced Back to Fluid Released from a Dehydrating Slab

日本温泉科学会第71回大会、特別講演ⅡSince 2003, we have begun a geochemical research for hot spring derived from slabdehydrated fluid and have published results of the research as papers from 2005. In addition, we were working together with researchers in metamorphic petrology and the effort contributed to development of a research theme in the interdisciplinary field and fostering of younger researchers. In a special lecture at the 67th annual meeting of the Japanese Society of Hot Spring Sciences held in September 2018, the author spoke overview our research, and furthermore, he presented two related sub-research subjects which had been introduced by previous oral presentations at several academic conferences. In this paper, the results of the sub-researches including new findings obtained during the preparation process of this oral presentation will be written down. 私たちは 2003年よりスラプ脱水流体由来の温泉の地球流体化学的探索を始め，その研究成果を論文等として公表し (2005年-2016年）．その一方で，変成岩岩石学との分野横断研究を行って新たな研究課題の創始と若手研究者の育成にも貢献した. 2018年 9月に開催された日本温泉科学会第 67回大会における特別講演において．これまでの私たちの研究の概要を紹介するとともに．学会での口頭発表にとどまっている関連の 2つのサプ研究課題についても発表した．この論文には．今回の発表の準備過程で手にした新たな知見を含むそのサプ研究の成果を書き留める

Demo. Video scene segmentation system using audio-visual features

This work demonstrates a new approach to video temporal segmentation into scenes. The utilized technique is based on an audio-visual extension of the well-known method of the Scene Transition Graph (STG). This multi-modal extension exploits both low- and high-level audio-visual descriptors to construct distinct STGs. These STGs are employed into a probabilistic framework that is used for estimating a confidence value on each shot boundary also being a scene boundary. Finally, the thresholding of these confidence values generates the set of experimentally estimated scene boundaries. In this demo both the scene segmentation outcome and some intermediate features that lead to it are demonstrated