28 research outputs found
What do citizens communicate about during crises? Analyzing twitter use during the 2011 UK riots
Abstract The use of social media during crises has been explored in a variety of natural and man-made crisis situations. Yet, most of these studies have focused exclusively on the communication strategies and messages sent by crisis responders. Surprisingly little research has been done on how crisis publics (i.e., those people interested in or affected by the crisis) use social media during such events. Our article addresses this gap in the context of citizens' Twitter use during the 2011 riots in the UK. Focusing on communications with and about police forces in two cities, we analyzed 5984 citizen tweets collected during the event for content and sentiment. Comparing the two cases, our findings suggest that citizens' Twitter communication follows a general logic of concerns, but can also be influenced very easily by single, non-crisis related events such as perceived missteps in a police force's Twitter communication. Our study provides insights into citizens' concerns and communication patterns during crises adding to our knowledge about the dynamics of citizens' use of social media in such times. It further highlights the fragmentation in Twitter audiences especially in later stages of the crisis. These observations can be utilized by police forces to help determine the appropriate organizational responses that facilitate coping across various stages of crisis events. In addition, they illustrate limitations in current theoretical understandings of crisis response strategies, adding the requirement for adaptivity, flexibility and ambiguity in organizational responses to address the observed plurivocality of crisis audiences
Detecting Dysfluencies in Stuttering Therapy Using wav2vec 2.0
Stuttering is a varied speech disorder that harms an individual's
communication ability. Persons who stutter (PWS) often use speech therapy to
cope with their condition. Improving speech recognition systems for people with
such non-typical speech or tracking the effectiveness of speech therapy would
require systems that can detect dysfluencies while at the same time being able
to detect speech techniques acquired in therapy. This paper shows that
fine-tuning wav2vec 2.0 [1] for the classification of stuttering on a sizeable
English corpus containing stuttered speech, in conjunction with multi-task
learning, boosts the effectiveness of the general-purpose wav2vec 2.0 features
for detecting stuttering in speech; both within and across languages. We
evaluate our method on FluencyBank , [2] and the German therapy-centric Kassel
State of Fluency (KSoF) [3] dataset by training Support Vector Machine
classifiers using features extracted from the finetuned models for six
different stuttering-related event types: blocks, prolongations, sound
repetitions, word repetitions, interjections, and - specific to therapy -
speech modifications. Using embeddings from the fine-tuned models leads to
relative classification performance gains up to 27% w.r.t. F1-score.Comment: Accepted at Interspeech 202
Best practice in police social media adaptation
Summary:
Best Practice in Police Social Media Adaptation.
This document describes best practice of European
police forces in adapting social media. The description
of these practices stems from a workshop series and
other events where police ICT experts met with academics
and industry experts; and from a study of the
Twitter usage of British police forces during the 2011
riots. Grouped in nine categories, we describe different
uses and implementation strategies of social media by
police forces. Based on these examples, we show that
there have been numerous ways in which police forces
benefitted from adopting social media, ranging from
improved information for investigations and an improved
relationship with the public to a more efficient
use of resources
A Stutter Seldom Comes Alone -- Cross-Corpus Stuttering Detection as a Multi-label Problem
Most stuttering detection and classification research has viewed stuttering
as a multi-class classification problem or a binary detection task for each
dysfluency type; however, this does not match the nature of stuttering, in
which one dysfluency seldom comes alone but rather co-occurs with others. This
paper explores multi-language and cross-corpus end-to-end stuttering detection
as a multi-label problem using a modified wav2vec 2.0 system with an
attention-based classification head and multi-task learning. We evaluate the
method using combinations of three datasets containing English and German
stuttered speech, one containing speech modified by fluency shaping. The
experimental results and an error analysis show that multi-label stuttering
detection systems trained on cross-corpus and multi-language data achieve
competitive results but performance on samples with multiple labels stays below
over-all detection results.Comment: Accepted for presentation at Interspeech 2023. arXiv admin note:
substantial text overlap with arXiv:2210.1598
Multi-class Detection of Pathological Speech with Latent Features: How does it perform on unseen data?
The detection of pathologies from speech features is usually defined as a
binary classification task with one class representing a specific pathology and
the other class representing healthy speech. In this work, we train neural
networks, large margin classifiers, and tree boosting machines to distinguish
between four different pathologies: Parkinson's disease, laryngeal cancer,
cleft lip and palate, and oral squamous cell carcinoma. We demonstrate that
latent representations extracted at different layers of a pre-trained wav2vec
2.0 system can be effectively used to classify these types of pathological
voices. We evaluate the robustness of our classifiers by adding room impulse
responses to the test data and by applying them to unseen speech corpora. Our
approach achieves unweighted average F1-Scores between 74.1% and 96.4%,
depending on the model and the noise conditions used. The systems generalize
and perform well on unseen data of healthy speakers sampled from a variety of
different sources.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 202
Classifying Dementia in the Presence of Depression: A Cross-Corpus Study
Automated dementia screening enables early detection and intervention,
reducing costs to healthcare systems and increasing quality of life for those
affected. Depression has shared symptoms with dementia, adding complexity to
diagnoses. The research focus so far has been on binary classification of
dementia (DEM) and healthy controls (HC) using speech from picture description
tests from a single dataset. In this work, we apply established baseline
systems to discriminate cognitive impairment in speech from the semantic Verbal
Fluency Test and the Boston Naming Test using text, audio and emotion
embeddings in a 3-class classification problem (HC vs. MCI vs. DEM). We perform
cross-corpus and mixed-corpus experiments on two independently recorded German
datasets to investigate generalization to larger populations and different
recording conditions. In a detailed error analysis, we look at depression as a
secondary diagnosis to understand what our classifiers actually learn.Comment: Accepted at INTERSPEECH 202