Automatically Recognising European Portuguese Children's Speech

International audienceThis paper reports findings from an analysis of errors made by an automatic speech recogniser trained and tested with 3-10-year-old European Portuguese children's speech. We expected and were able to identify frequent pronunciation error patterns in the children's speech. Furthermore, we were able to correlate some of these pronunciation error patterns and automatic speech recognition errors. The findings reported in this paper are of phonetic interest but will also be useful for improving the performance of automatic speech recognisers aimed at children representing the target population of the study

Attention-based Audio-Visual Fusion for Robust Automatic Speech Recognition

Automatic speech recognition can potentially benefit from the lip motion patterns, complementing acoustic speech to improve the overall recognition performance, particularly in noise. In this paper we propose an audio-visual fusion strategy that goes beyond simple feature concatenation and learns to automatically align the two modalities, leading to enhanced representations which increase the recognition accuracy in both clean and noisy conditions. We test our strategy on the TCD-TIMIT and LRS2 datasets, designed for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition, applying three types of noise at different power ratios. We also exploit state of the art Sequence-to-Sequence architectures, showing that our method can be easily integrated. Results show relative improvements from 7% up to 30% on TCD-TIMIT over the acoustic modality alone, depending on the acoustic noise level. We anticipate that the fusion strategy can easily generalise to many other multimodal tasks which involve correlated modalities. Code available online on GitHub: https://github.com/georgesterpu/Sigmedia-AVSRComment: In ICMI'18, October 16-20, 2018, Boulder, CO, USA. Equation (2) corrected on this versio

Evidence for t\bar{t}\gamma Production and Measurement of \sigma_t\bar{t}\gamma / \sigma_t\bar{t}

Using data corresponding to 6.0/fb of ppbar collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV collected by the CDF II detector, we present a cross section measurement of top-quark pair production with an additional radiated photon. The events are selected by looking for a lepton, a photon, significant transverse momentum imbalance, large total transverse energy, and three or more jets, with at least one identified as containing a b quark. The ttbar+photon sample requires the photon to have 10 GeV or more of transverse energy, and to be in the central region. Using an event selection optimized for the ttbar+photon candidate sample we measure the production cross section of, and the ratio of cross sections of the two samples. Control samples in the dilepton+photon and lepton+photon+\met, channels are constructed to aid in decay product identification and background measurements. We observe 30 ttbar+photon candidate events compared to the standard model expectation of 26.9 +/- 3.4 events. We measure the ttbar+photon cross section to be 0.18+0.08 pb, and the ratio of the cross section of ttbar+photon to ttbar to be 0.024 +/- 0.009. Assuming no ttbar+photon production, we observe a probability of 0.0015 of the background events alone producing 30 events or more, corresponding to 3.0 standard deviations.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

A search for resonant production of ttˉt\bar{t} pairs in $4.8\ \rm{fb}^{-1}ofintegratedluminosityof of integrated luminosity of p\bar{p}collisionsat collisions at \sqrt{s}=1.96\ \rm{TeV}$

We search for resonant production of tt pairs in 4.8 fb^{-1} integrated luminosity of ppbar collision data at sqrt{s}=1.96 TeV in the lepton+jets decay channel, where one top quark decays leptonically and the other hadronically. A matrix element reconstruction technique is used; for each event a probability density function (pdf) of the ttbar candidate invariant mass is sampled. These pdfs are used to construct a likelihood function, whereby the cross section for resonant ttbar production is estimated, given a hypothetical resonance mass and width. The data indicate no evidence of resonant production of ttbar pairs. A benchmark model of leptophobic Z \rightarrow ttbar is excluded with m_{Z'} < 900 GeV at 95% confidence level.Comment: accepted for publication in Physical Review D Sep 21, 201

Precision Top-Quark Mass Measurements at CDF

We present a precision measurement of the top-quark mass using the full sample of Tevatron $\sqrt{s}=1.96$ TeV proton-antiproton collisions collected by the CDF II detector, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 8.7 $fb^{-1}$. Using a sample of $t\bar{t}$ candidate events decaying into the lepton+jets channel, we obtain distributions of the top-quark masses and the invariant mass of two jets from the $W$ boson decays from data. We then compare these distributions to templates derived from signal and background samples to extract the top-quark mass and the energy scale of the calorimeter jets with {\it in situ} calibration. The likelihood fit of the templates from signal and background events to the data yields the single most-precise measurement of the top-quark mass, \mtop = 172.85 \pm$0.71 (stat)$\pm$0.85 (syst) GeV/c^{2}.$Comment: submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Combined search for the standard model Higgs boson decaying to a bb pair using the full CDF data set

We combine the results of searches for the standard model Higgs boson based on the full CDF Run II data set obtained from sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV p-pbar collisions at the Fermilab Tevatron corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 9.45/fb. The searches are conducted for Higgs bosons that are produced in association with a W or Z boson, have masses in the range 90-150 GeV/c^2, and decay into bb pairs. An excess of data is present that is inconsistent with the background prediction at the level of 2.5 standard deviations (the most significant local excess is 2.7 standard deviations).Comment: To be published in Phys. Rev. Lett (v2 contains minor updates based on comments from PRL

Measurement of the WZWZ Cross Section and Triple Gauge Couplings in ppˉp \bar p Collisions at s=1.96\sqrt{s} = 1.96 TeV

This Letter describes the current most precise measurement of the $WZ$ production cross section as well as limits on anomalous $WWZ$ couplings at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV in proton-antiproton collisions for the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). $WZ$ candidates are reconstructed from decays containing three charged leptons and missing energy from a neutrino, where the charged leptons are either electrons or muons. Using data collected by the CDF II detector (7.1 fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity), 63 candidate events are observed with the expected background contributing $8 \pm 1$ events. The measured total cross section $\sigma (p \bar p \to WZ) = 3.93_{-0.53}^{+0.60}(\text{stat})_{-0.46}^{+0.59}(\text{syst})$ pb is in good agreement with the standard model prediction of $3.50\pm 0.21$. The same sample is used to set limits on anomalous $WWZ$ couplings.Comment: Resubmission to PRD-RC after acceptance (27 July 2012

Measurements of branching fraction ratios and CP-asymmetries in suppressed B^- -> D(-> K^+ pi^-)K^- and B^- -> D(-> K^+ pi^-)pi^- decays

We report the first reconstruction in hadron collisions of the suppressed decays B^- -> D(-> K^+ pi^-)K^- and B^- -> D(-> K^+ pi^-)pi^-, sensitive to the CKM phase gamma, using data from 7 fb^-1 of integrated luminosity collected by the CDF II detector at the Tevatron collider. We reconstruct a signal for the B^- -> D(-> K^+ pi^-)K^- suppressed mode with a significance of 3.2 standard deviations, and measure the ratios of the suppressed to favored branching fractions R(K) = [22.0 \pm 8.6(stat)\pm 2.6(syst)]\times 10^-3, R^+(K) = [42.6\pm 13.7(stat)\pm 2.8(syst)]\times 10^-3, R^-(K)= [3.8\pm 10.3(stat)\pm 2.7(syst]\times 10^-3, as well as the direct CP-violating asymmetry A(K) = -0.82\pm 0.44(stat)\pm 0.09(syst) of this mode. Corresponding quantities for B^- -> D(-> K^+ pi^-)pi^- decay are also reported.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, accepted by Phys.Rev.D Rapid Communications for Publicatio