Effectiveness in the Realisation of Speaker Authentication

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.An important consideration for the deployment of speaker recognition in authentication applications is the approach to the formation of training and testing utterances . Whilst defining this for a specific scenario is influenced by the associated requirements and conditions, the process can be further guided through the establishment of the relative usefulness of alternative frameworks for composing the training and testing material. In this regard, the present paper provides an analysis of the effects, on the speaker recognition accuracy, of various bases for the formation of the training and testing data. The experimental investigations are conducted based on the use of digit utterances taken from the XM2VTS database. The paper presents a detailed description of the individual approaches considered and discusses the experimental results obtained in different cases

Combination of large nanostructures and complex band structure for high performance thermoelectric lead telluride

The complexity of the valence band structure in p-type PbTe has been shown to enable a significant enhancement of the average thermoelectric figure of merit (zT) when heavily doped with Na. It has also been shown that when PbTe is nanostructured with large nanometer sized Ag_2Te precipitates there is an enhancement of zT due to phonon scattering at the interfaces. The enhancement in zT resulting from these two mechanisms is of similar magnitude but, in principle, decoupled from one another. This work experimentally demonstrates a successful combination of the complexity in the valence band structure with the addition of nanostructuring to create a high performance thermoelectric material. These effects lead to a high zT over a wide temperature range with peak zT > 1.5 at T > 650 K in Na-doped PbTe/Ag_2Te. This high average zT produces 30% higher efficiency (300–750 K) than pure Na-doped PbTe because of the nanostructures, while the complex valence band structure leads to twice the efficiency as the related n-type La-doped PbTe/Ag_2Te without such band structure complexity

Categorical Account of Gradient Acceptability of Word-Initial Polish Onsets

We examine how well categorical and probabilistic phonotactic learning models extract grammars which predict Polish speakers' acceptability judgments of words with varied initial consonant clusters. Polish is an especially interesting language to look at because of its rich inventory of sonority-sequencing defying consonant clusters, often as a result of yer-deletion. In line with results by Gorman (2013) and Durvasula (2020), we find that the categorical baselines considered here generally outperformed the Hayes and Wilson's (2008) maximum-entropy based phonotactic learner. We conclude that gradient acceptability judgments do not provide unambiguous evidence for gradient, probabilistic grammars. 

An Algebraic Characterization of Total Input Strictly Local Functions

This paper provides an algebraic characteriza- tion of the total input strictly local functions. Simultaneous, noniterative rules of the form A→B/C D, common in phonology, are defin- able as functions in this class whenever CAD represents a finite set of strings. The algebraic characterization highlights a fundamental con- nection between input strictly local functions and the simple class of definite string languages, as well as connections to string functions stud- ied in the computer science literature, the def- inite functions and local functions. No effec- tive decision procedure for the input strictly local maps was previously available, but one arises directly from this characterization. This work also shows that, unlike the full class, a restricted subclass is closed under composition. Additionally, some products are defined which may yield new factorization methods

Incomplete neutralization and the blueprint model of production

The division of labor between the phonetic and phonological modules in generative linguistics has often been allocated such that phonology handles the discrete and symbolic aspects of a language's sound system, while the phonetics transforms the symbols either into, or from, continuously varying acoustic and/or articulatory representations. This type of architecture struggles with accounting for incomplete neutralization where two segments are neutralized phonologically, but maintain a measurable phonetic distinction. While some explanations of this phenomenon blur the lines between phonetics and phonology, this paper provides an alternate approach by restructuring the architecture of "modular feedforward models". This is done by conceptualizing the language production pipeline as a series of functions and considering the types of each function. The resulting model is referred to as the `Blueprint Model of Production' and maintains many of the assumptions of modular feedforward models while also being able to explain incomplete neutralization data. Final devoicing is used as an example case

RedTyp: A Database of Reduplication with Computational Models

Reduplication is a theoretically and typologically well-studied phenomenon, but there is no database of reduplication patterns which include explicit computational models. This paper introduces RedTyp, an SQL database which provides a computational resource that can be used by both theoretical and computational linguists who work on reduplication. It catalogs 138 reduplicative morphemes across 91 languages, which are modeled with 57 distinct finite-state machines. The finite-state machines are 2-way transducers, which provide an explicit, compact, and convenient representation for reduplication patterns, and which arguably capture the linguistic generalizations more directly than the more commonly used 1-way transducers for modeling natural language morphophonology