Canadian Gas Exports : Modeling a Market in Disequilibrium: Cahiers du CEG, n°2

Canada provides a major part of the additional volumes required by the huge American gas market. With a rather high reserves-production ratio, Canadian gas production will face no major technical constraints until the end of the century. However, large distortion due to Canadian regulatory policy and disequilibrium in the US gas market constrain suppl yand demand. In the first section, both volume and price historical regulation are briefly analyzed. Traditional econometric analysis of the Nonh American gas market cannot be used any longer. It is necessary to explicitly take into account the fact that supply of export and demand for import are not necessarily equal to the physical quantities actually exchanged onthe market.This paper provides in section 2 a comparison of various limited dependent v,uiable models to deal with this kind of particularity. In this way, parameters of behavioral relationships of the opera.tors are identifiable. The models are intended to provide a realistic background in an era when markets become deregulated. Statistical aspect of the disequilibrium approach used in this paper has been introduced by FAIR and JAFFEE (1972) and developped by MADDALA and NELSON (1974)

Affect-LM: A Neural Language Model for Customizable Affective Text Generation

Human verbal communication includes affective messages which are conveyed through use of emotionally colored words. There has been a lot of research in this direction but the problem of integrating state-of-the-art neural language models with affective information remains an area ripe for exploration. In this paper, we propose an extension to an LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) language model for generating conversational text, conditioned on affect categories. Our proposed model, Affect-LM enables us to customize the degree of emotional content in generated sentences through an additional design parameter. Perception studies conducted using Amazon Mechanical Turk show that Affect-LM generates naturally looking emotional sentences without sacrificing grammatical correctness. Affect-LM also learns affect-discriminative word representations, and perplexity experiments show that additional affective information in conversational text can improve language model prediction

Suggestions for Extending SAIBA with the VIB Platform

International audienc

Changements structurels dans un modèle économétrique de demande de carburant: Cahiers du CEG, n°9

Les changements observés dans b demande de carburant en France depuistrois décennies soulèvent le problème de l'évolution du comportement des consommateurset de sa prise en compte dans la modélisation économétrique. L'application dedifférents tests de stabilité temporelle des coefficients de régression -- Chow, Brown,Durbin et Evans, Farley et Hinich - est développée à partir d'un modèle d'ajustementpartiel. Ces tests mettent en évidence l'évolution progressive des paramètres liés aupouvoir d'achat (forte croissance suivie d'un ralentissement progressif) alors que l'effetprix est asymétrique suivant que ceux-ci varient à la hausse ou à la baisse. L'expertisecombinant à la fois l'induction statistique et. l'interprétation économique (loi d'Engel)permet d'améliorer la modélisation en y introduisant les modifications structurellesde la consommation. L'influence d'événements exceptionnels (crises pétrolières dansnotre cas), se traduisant par des points aberrants sur l'ajustement économétrique, estdiscutée. Enfin, plusieurs spécifications d'équations corrigeant la stabilité temporellesont comparées

Amélioration d'un codeur de parole à très bas débit par indexation d'unités de taille variable

L'objectif de cet article est de démontrer la faisabilité du codage de la parole à très bas débit (environ 400 bits/s) par indexation d'unités de parole naturelles de taille variable, avec une bonne qualité de parole restituée. L'approche ALISP (Automatic Language Independent Speech Processing), telle qu'elle est décrite dans la thèse de Jan CERNOCKY, permet d'atteindre ces débits. Elle souffre toutefois d'un certain nombre de défauts qui limitent la qualité de la parole reproduite. Nous proposons quelques solutions alternatives, pour la segmentation du signal à coder, la recherche des unités de synthèse, et la concaténation de ces unités, pour améliorer cette qualité

Influence of Marital Status and Employment Status on Long-Term Adherence with Continuous Positive Airway Pressure in Sleep Apnea Patients

) of consecutive OSAHS patients in whom CPAP had been prescribed for at least 90 days, we studied the impact on long-term treatment adherence of socioeconomic factors, patients and disease characteristics prior to CPAP initiation. living alone; p = 0.01). Age, gender, Epworth sleepiness scale, depressive syndrome, associated cardiovascular morbidities, educational attainment and occupation category did not influence CPAP adherence.Marital status and employment status are independent factors of CPAP adherence in addition to BMI and disease severity. Patients living alone and/or working patients are at greater risk of non-adherence, whereas adherence is higher in married and retired patients. These findings suggest that the social context of daily life should be taken into account in risk screening for CPAP non-adherence. Future interventional studies targeting at-risk patients should be designed to address social motivating factors and work-related barriers to CPAP adherence

Swiss French PolyPhone and PolyVar: telephone speech databases to model inter- and intra-speaker variability

Following the demand of the speech technology market, a number of companies and research laboratories joined their forces in order to produce valuable and reusable resources, especially speech databases. Serving their purpose, the collected databases are used for developing, testing, enhancing and evaluating speech technology products, like interactive voice servers, listening typewriter, speaker verification and identification systems, etc. Especially for capturing intra-speaker variability, the PolyVar database was designed and recorded at IDIAP, as a complement to the Swiss French PolyPhone database, which adresses inter-speaker variability issues. We will detail in the following the specific problems of speech database collection (sampling the speaker population, selection of vocabulary items, ...), and will present actual development we carried out at IDIAP throught the PolyPhone and PolyVar databases