An Analysis of Rhythmic Staccato-Vocalization Based on Frequency Demodulation for Laughter Detection in Conversational Meetings

Human laugh is able to convey various kinds of meanings in human communications. There exists various kinds of human laugh signal, for example: vocalized laugh and non vocalized laugh. Following the theories of psychology, among all the vocalized laugh type, rhythmic staccato-vocalization significantly evokes the positive responses in the interactions. In this paper we attempt to exploit this observation to detect human laugh occurrences, i.e., the laughter, in multiparty conversations from the AMI meeting corpus. First, we separate the high energy frames from speech, leaving out the low energy frames through power spectral density estimation. We borrow the algorithm of rhythm detection from the area of music analysis to use that on the high energy frames. Finally, we detect rhythmic laugh frames, analyzing the candidate rhythmic frames using statistics. This novel approach for detection of `positive' rhythmic human laughter performs better than the standard laughter classification baseline.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, conference pape

Clinico- Pathological profiling of Emergency Adolescent Gynecological Problems: A Six Months Retrospective Study

Background: India is one of the fastest growing countries and is home for more than 243 million adolescents. Adolescent gynecological problem needs careful and important attention as it has immense implication on future reproductive and personal health of women.Objective(s): To study the profile of adolescent girls, seeking in patient treatment for emergency gynecological problems.Method(s): A total of 294 adolescent girls admitted for inpatient treatment for their emergency gynecological problems. Meticulous history taking, examination and investigations were done.Results: 294 adolescent girls attended emergency for in- patient treatment in the study period (July 2014 – December 2014). Patients with pregnancy related complications [230, (78%)] outnumbered the patients having gynecological problems [64 (22%)]. Among pregnancy related complications, incomplete abortion [104, 35%] was the single most common cause for hospital admission, seeking inpatient treatment whereas among gynecological causes, menorrhagia [18, 6%] was most common cause.Conclusion: Adolescent gynecology needs increased awareness and greater attention in order to protect and promote the health of teenagers with the help of specialized adolescent clinic. Measures should be taken to prevent teenage pregnancy and unwanted pregnancy

Investigating Fine Temporal Dynamics of Prosodic and Lexical Accommodation

Conversational interaction is a dynamic activity in which participants engage in the construction of meaning and in establishing and maintaining social relationships. Lexical and prosodic accommodation have been observed in many studies as contributing importantly to these dimensions of social interaction. However, while previous works have considered accommodation mechanisms at global levels (for whole conversations, halves and thirds of conversations), this work investigates their evolution through repeated analysis at time intervals of increasing granularity to analyze the dynamics of alignment in a spoken language corpus. Results show that the levels of both prosodic and lexical accommodation fluctuate several times over the course of a conversation

End-to-End Acoustic Feedback in Language Learning for Correcting Devoiced French Final-Fricatives

International audienceThis work aims at providing an end-to-end acoustic feedback framework to help learners of French to pronounce voiced frica-tives. A classifier ensemble detects voiced/unvoiced utterances, then a correction method is proposed to improve the perception and production of voiced fricatives in a word-final position. Realizations of voiced fricatives contained in French sentences uttered by French and German speakers were analyzed to find out the deviations between the acoustic cues realized by the two groups of speakers. The correction method consists in substituting the erroneous devoiced fricative by TD-PSOLA concate-native synthesis that uses exemplars of voiced fricatives chosen from a French speaker corpus. To achieve a seamless concatena-tion the energy of the replacement fricative was adjusted with respect to the energy levels of the learner's and French speaker's preceding vowels. Finally, a perception experiment with the corrected stimuli has been carried out with French native speakers to check the appropriateness of the fricative revoicing. The results showed that the proposed revoicing strategy proved to be very efficient and can be used as an acoustic feedback

L1-L2 Interference: The case of final devoicing of French voiced fricatives in final position by German learners

International audienceThis work is dealing with a case of L1-L2 interference in language learning. The Germans learning French as a second language frequently produce unvoiced fricatives in word-final position instead of the expected voiced fricatives. We investigated the production of French fricatives for 16 non-native (8 beginner-and 8 advanced-learners) and 8 native speakers, and designed auditory feedback to help them realize the right voicing feature. The productions of all speakers were categorized either as voiced or unvoiced by experts. The same fricatives were also evaluated by non-experts in a perception experiment targeting VCs. We compare the ratings by experts and non-experts with the feature-based analysis. The ratio of locally unvoiced frames in the consonantal segment and also the ratio between consonantal duration and V1 duration were measured. The acoustic cues of neighboring sounds and pitch-based features play a significant role in the voicing judgment. As expected, we found that beginners face more difficulties to produce voiced fricatives than advanced learners. Also, the production becomes easier for the learners, especially for the beginners, if they practice repetition after a native speaker. We use these findings to design and develop feedback via speech analysis/synthesis technique TD-PSOLA using the learner's own voice

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (3rd edition)

In 2008 we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, research on this topic has continued to accelerate, and many new scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Accordingly, it is important to update these guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Various reviews have described the range of assays that have been used for this purpose. Nevertheless, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to measure autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. For example, a key point that needs to be emphasized is that there is a difference between measurements that monitor the numbers or volume of autophagic elements (e.g., autophagosomes or autolysosomes) at any stage of the autophagic process versus those that measure fl ux through the autophagy pathway (i.e., the complete process including the amount and rate of cargo sequestered and degraded). In particular, a block in macroautophagy that results in autophagosome accumulation must be differentiated from stimuli that increase autophagic activity, defi ned as increased autophagy induction coupled with increased delivery to, and degradation within, lysosomes (inmost higher eukaryotes and some protists such as Dictyostelium ) or the vacuole (in plants and fungi). In other words, it is especially important that investigators new to the fi eld understand that the appearance of more autophagosomes does not necessarily equate with more autophagy. In fact, in many cases, autophagosomes accumulate because of a block in trafficking to lysosomes without a concomitant change in autophagosome biogenesis, whereas an increase in autolysosomes may reflect a reduction in degradative activity. It is worth emphasizing here that lysosomal digestion is a stage of autophagy and evaluating its competence is a crucial part of the evaluation of autophagic flux, or complete autophagy. Here, we present a set of guidelines for the selection and interpretation of methods for use by investigators who aim to examine macroautophagy and related processes, as well as for reviewers who need to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of papers that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a formulaic set of rules, because the appropriate assays depend in part on the question being asked and the system being used. In addition, we emphasize that no individual assay is guaranteed to be the most appropriate one in every situation, and we strongly recommend the use of multiple assays to monitor autophagy. Along these lines, because of the potential for pleiotropic effects due to blocking autophagy through genetic manipulation it is imperative to delete or knock down more than one autophagy-related gene. In addition, some individual Atg proteins, or groups of proteins, are involved in other cellular pathways so not all Atg proteins can be used as a specific marker for an autophagic process. In these guidelines, we consider these various methods of assessing autophagy and what information can, or cannot, be obtained from them. Finally, by discussing the merits and limits of particular autophagy assays, we hope to encourage technical innovation in the field

End-to-End Discourse Parsing with Cascaded Structured Prediction

Parsing discourse is a challenging natural language processing task. In this research work first we take a data driven approach to identify arguments of explicit discourse connectives. In contrast to previous work we do not make any assumptions on the span of arguments and consider parsing as a token-level sequence labeling task. We design the argument segmentation task as a cascade of decisions based on conditional random fields (CRFs). We train the CRFs on lexical, syntactic and semantic features extracted from the Penn Discourse Treebank and evaluate feature combinations on the commonly used test split. We show that the best combination of features includes syntactic and semantic features. The comparative error analysis investigates the performance variability over connective types and argument positions. We also compare the results of cascaded pipeline with a non-cascaded structured prediction setting that shows us definitely the cascaded structured prediction is a better performing method for discourse parsing. We present a novel end-to-end discourse parser that, given a plain text document in input, identifies the discourse relations in the text, assigns them a semantic label and detects discourse arguments spans. The parsing architecture is based on a cascade of decisions supported by Conditional Random Fields (CRF). We train and evaluate three different parsers using the PDTB corpus. The three system versions are compared to evaluate their robustness with respect to deep/shallow and automatically extracted syntactic features. Next, we describe two constraint-based methods that can be used to improve the recall of a shallow discourse parser based on conditional random field chunking. These method uses a set of natural structural constraints as well as others that follow from the annotation guidelines of the Penn Discourse Treebank. We evaluated the resulting systems on the standard test set of the PDTB and achieved a rebalancing of precision and recall with improved F-measures across the board. This was especially notable when we used evaluation metrics taking partial matches into account; for these measures, we achieved F-measure improvements of several points. Finally, we address the problem of optimization in discourse parsing. A good model for discourse structure analysis needs to account both for local dependencies at the token-level and for global dependencies and statistics. We present techniques on using inter-sentential or sentence-level(global), data-driven, non-grammatical features in the task of parsing discourse. The parser model follows up previous approach based on using token-level (local) features with conditional random fields for shallow discourse parsing, which is lacking in structural knowledge of discourse. The parser adopts a two-stage approach where first the local constraints are applied and then global constraints are used on a reduced weighted search space ($n$-best). In the latter stage we experiment with different rerankers trained on the first stage $n$-best parses, which are generated using lexico-syntactic local features. The two-stage parser yields significant improvements over the best performing model of discourse parser on the PDTB corpus

Study of cGMP regulation in Drosophila melanogaster and its importance in identification of novel druggable targets of Diarrhea in humans.

Volume 8 Issue 1 (January 201