Advances in the CMU/InterACT Arabic GALE transcription system

This paper describes the CMU/InterACT effort in developing an Arabic Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system for broadcast news and conversations within the GALE 2006 evaluation. Through the span of 9 month in preparation for this evaluation we improved our system by 40 % relative compared to our legacy system. These improvements have been achieved by various steps, such as developing a vowelized system, combining this system with a non-vowelized one, harvesting transcripts of TV shows from the web for slightly supervised training of acoustic models, as well as language model adaptation, and finally fine-tuning the overall ASR system

Tight Glycemic control in acute coronary syndromes: Prognostic implications

Background: Elevated admission plasma glucose is associated with increased mortality in patients who are admitted with acute coronary syndromes. Aim: To validate the hypothesis that tight glycemic control could reduce major adverse cardiac events in hyperglycemic patients with acute coronary syndromes. Methods: Fifty adult patients admitted with acute coronary syndromes within 6 h of presentation with “RBS > 140 mg/dl” were enrolled in this study to evaluate the effect of tight glycemic control using insulin actrapid infusion (aiming at RBS of 80–130 mg/dl during the 1st 24 h post admission) on decreasing infarct size, and major adverse cardiac events during ICU admission and 30 days follow up. Results: Of 50 patients enrolled in the study, 25 patients received insulin by infusion (group A), while the rest received insulin via S.C. route (group B). The glycemic control was significantly lower in group A. Heart failure at 7 and 30 days was 4% and 12%, respectively, in group A vs. 20% and 24%, respectively, in group B. Hemodynamic instability was seen in 8% in group A vs. 28% in group B during the ICU stay. Mortality at 7 and 30 days was 0% and 0%, respectively, for group A vs. 4% and 12%, respectively, for group B. Conclusion: Tight glycemic control in patients with acute coronary syndromes presenting with hyperglycemia on admission is beneficial

Recent Improvements in the CMU Large Scale Chinese-English SMT System

In this paper we describe recent improvements to components and methods used in our statistical machine translation system for Chinese-English used in the January 2008 GALE evaluation. Main improvements are results of consistent data processing, larger statistical models and a POS-based word reordering approach

The isl rt04 mandarin broadcast news evaluation system

This paper describes our effort in developing a Mandarin Broadcast News system for the RT-04f (Rich Transcription) evaluation. Starting from a legacy system, we revisited all the issues including partitioning, acoustic modeling, language modeling, decoding and system combination strategies. We have achieved a sizable improvement, from 21.2% to 5.2 % on the development set, from 42.7 % to 22.4 % measured on the RT-04f evaluation set, over a period of three months. 1

Pomona College, Swarthmore College,

of Defense, � SRI Although Arabic is currently one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, there has been relatively little speech recognition research on Arabic compared to other languages. Moreover, most previous work has concentrated on the recognition of formal rather than dialectal Arabic. This paper reports on our project at the 2002 Johns Hopkins Summer Workshop, which focused on the recognition of dialectal Arabic. Three problems were addressed: (a) the lack of short vowels and other pronunciation information in Arabic texts; (b) the morphological complexity of Arabic; and (c) the discrepancies between dialectal and formal Arabic. We present novel approaches to automatic vowel restoration, morphology-based language modeling and the integration of outof-corpus language model data, and report significant word error rate improvements on the LDC Arabic CallHome task