The effect of the speaker's confmnatory question on understandability of verbal explanation

Previous studies have shown that confirmatory questions enhance the understandability of an explanation. Examples include asking a degree of understanding of the listener and current state of the description target in verbal explanation. In the current study, we examined the effect of two types of confirmatory question by tbe speaker on tbe degree of understanding of the listener. The experimenter verbally explained to participants how to draw a geometric figore. We manipulated tbe types of explanation: (a) tbe speaker aaks a degree of understanding of the listener dwing explanation, (b) the speaker asks a current state of the description target during explanation, and (c) the speaker simply repeats the explanation. As a result, tbe highest understandability score was attained when tbe explanation was repeated. Accuracy scores of the drawing were high in all three situations; we therefore conclude that conimnatory questions are not effective in every situation of verbal explanation. Repetition of the explanation is sufficient to increase the listener's understanding if the content of the description is simple

End-to-End Joint Target and Non-Target Speakers ASR

This paper proposes a novel automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that can transcribe individual speaker's speech while identifying whether they are target or non-target speakers from multi-talker overlapped speech. Target-speaker ASR systems are a promising way to only transcribe a target speaker's speech by enrolling the target speaker's information. However, in conversational ASR applications, transcribing both the target speaker's speech and non-target speakers' ones is often required to understand interactive information. To naturally consider both target and non-target speakers in a single ASR model, our idea is to extend autoregressive modeling-based multi-talker ASR systems to utilize the enrollment speech of the target speaker. Our proposed ASR is performed by recursively generating both textual tokens and tokens that represent target or non-target speakers. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.Comment: Accepted at Interspeech 202

Rapid Fatal Acute Peripheral T-Cell Lymphoma Associated With IgG Plasma Cell Leukemia and IgA Hypergammaglobulinemia

Simultaneous occurrence of T-cell and B-cell neoplasms is rare and etiologic relationships between these two malignancies are poorly understood. We describe a case of 66-year-old woman who was admitted to the hospital because of fever, hemoptysis, lymphadenopathy, and skin rash. Enlarged lymph nodes in the axillary, pectoral, paratracheal and periportal regions, as well as slight hepato- and splenomegaly were confirmed. Peripheral blood smear revealed rouleaux formation and numerous circulating plasma cells, with plasmacytoid lymphocytes. Immunofixation- electrophoresis detected a monoclonal band defined as IgG-lambda light chains with broad band polyclonal IgA. The patient died from abrupt splenic rupture before diagnostic work-up was finished. Postmortem examination revealed infiltration of atypical lymphoid cells exhibiting high proliferative activity admixed with typical and atypical plasma cells in several organs. Thus plasma cell leukemia (IgG-lambda) as a rare and aggressive variant of plasma cell myeloma in present case was associated with aggressive peripheral T cell lymphoma and polyclonal (IgA) plasmacytosis