Automatic Decision Detection in Meeting Speech

Decision making is an important aspect of meetings in organisational settings, and archives of meeting recordings constitute a valuable source of information about the decisions made. However, standard utilities such as playback and keyword search are not sufficient for locating decision points from meeting archives. In this paper, we present the AMI DecisionDetector, a system that automatically detects and highlights where the decision-related conversations are. In this paper, we apply the models developed in our previous work [1], which detects decision-related dialogue acts (DAs) from parts of the transcripts that have been manually annotated as extract-worthy, to the task of detecting decision-related DAs and topic segments directly from complete transcripts. Results show that we need to combine features extracted from multiple knowledge sources (e.g., lexical, prosodic, DA-related, and topical class) in order to yield the model with the highest precision. We have provided a quantitative account of the feature class effects. As our ultimate goal is to operate AMI DecisionDetector in a fully automatic fashion, we also investigate the impacts of using automatically generated features, for example, the 5-class DA features obtained in [2]

The CALO meeting speech recognition and understanding system

ABSTRACT The CALO Meeting Assistant provides for distributed meeting capture, annotation, automatic transcription and semantic analysis of multi-party meetings, and is part of the larger CALO personal assistant system. This paper summarizes the CALO-MA architecture and its speech recognition and understanding components, which include realtime and offline speech transcription, dialog act segmentation and tagging, question-answer pair identification, action item recognition, and summarization

Impaired Executive Function Mediates the Association between Maternal Pre-Pregnancy Body Mass Index and Child ADHD Symptoms

Increasing evidence suggests exposure to adverse conditions in intrauterine life may increase the risk of developing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in childhood. High maternal pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) has been shown to predict child ADHD symptoms, however the neurocognitive processes underlying this relationship are not known. The aim of the present study was to test the hypothesis that this association is mediated by alterations in child executive function.A population-based cohort of 174 children (mean age = 7.3 ± 0.9 (SD) yrs, 55% girls) was evaluated for ADHD symptoms using the Child Behavior Checklist, and for neurocognitive function using the Go/No-go task. This cohort had been followed prospectively from early gestation and birth through infancy and childhood with serial measures of maternal and child prenatal and postnatal factors. Maternal pre-pregnancy BMI was a significant predictor of child ADHD symptoms (F((1,158)) = 4.80, p = 0.03) and of child performance on the Go/No-go task (F((1,157)) = 8.37, p = 0.004) after controlling for key potential confounding variables. A test of the mediation model revealed that the association between higher maternal pre-pregnancy BMI and child ADHD symptoms was mediated by impaired executive function (inefficient/less attentive processing; Sobel Test: t = 2.39 (± 0.002, SEM), p = 0.02).To the best of our knowledge this is the first study to report that maternal pre-pregnancy BMI-related alterations in child neurocognitive function may mediate its effects on ADHD risk. The finding is clinically significant and may extrapolate to an approximately 2.8-fold increase in the prevalence of ADHD among children of obese compared to those of non-obese mothers. These results add further evidence to the growing awareness that neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD may have their foundations very early in life

Normalized amplitude modulation features for large vocabulary noise-robust speech recognition

Background noise and channel degradations seriously constrain the performance of state-of-the-art speech recognition systems. Studies comparing human speech recognition performance with automatic speech recognition systems indicate that the human auditory system is highly robust against background noise and channel variabilities compared to automated systems. A traditional way to add robustness to a speech recognition system is to construct a robust feature set for the speech recognition model. In this work, we present an amplitude modulation feature derived from Teager’s nonlinear energy operator that is power normalized and cosine transformed to produce normalized modulation cepstral coefficient (NMCC) features. The proposed NMCC features are compared with respect to state-of-the-art noise-robust features in Aurora-2 and a renoised Wall Street Journal (WSJ) corpus. The WSJ word-recognition experiments were performed on both a clean and artificially renoised WSJ corpus using SRI’s DECIPHER large vocabulary speech recognition system. The experiments were performed under three train-test conditions: (a) matched, (b) mismatched, and (c) multi-conditioned. The Aurora-2 digit recognition task was performed using the standard HTK recognizer distributed with Aurora-2. Our results indicate that the proposed NMCC features demonstrated noise robustness in almost all the training-test conditions of renoised WSJ data and also improved digit recognition accuracies for Aurora-2 compared to the MFCCs and state-of-the-art noise-robust feature

Spotting Audio-Visual Inconsistencies (SAVI) in Manipulated Video

This paper is part of a larger effort to detect manipulations of video by searching for and combining the evidence of multiple types of inconsistencies between the audio and visual channels. Here, we focus on inconsistencies between the type of scenes detected in the audio and visual modalities (e.g., audio indoor, small room versus visual outdoor, urban), and inconsistencies in speaker identity tracking over a video given audio speaker features and visual face features (e.g., a voice change, but no talking face change). The scene inconsistency task was complicated by mismatches in the categories used in current visual scene and audio scene collections. To deal with this, we employed a novel semantic mapping method. The speaker identity inconsistency process was challenged by the complexity of comparing face tracks and audio speech clusters, requiring a novel method of fusing these two sources. Our progress on both tasks was demonstrated on two collections of tampered videos

Reduced expression of the cytokine transducer gp130 inhibits hormone secretion, cell growth, and tumor development of pituitary lactosomatotrophic GH3 cells

Two of the most potent cytokines that regulate anterior pituitary cell function are leukemia inhibitory factor and IL- 6. These and others like IL-11 and ciliary neurotrophic factor are referred to as the gp130 cytokines because they share the gp130 glycoprotein as a common receptor initial signal transducer. We and others have shown that gp130 cytokines and their receptors are expressed and functional in normal and tumoral anterior pituitary cells. To study the role of gp130 cytokines in tumorigenic process, we generated gp130 cDNA gp130 sense and gp130 antisense (gp130-AS) transfected stable clones derived from lactosomatotroph GH3 cells. We examined hormone secretion and cell proliferation of these clones as well as their tumorigenic properties in athymic nude mice. Although gp130-AS clones, which have low gp130 levels and impaired signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 activity and suppressor of cytokine signaling-3 expression, showed reduced proliferation and hormone secretion (GH and prolactin) in response to gp130 cytokines, they had a. normal response to gp130-independent stimuli. Moreover, gp130-AS clones showed a severely impaired in vivo tumor development. In contrast, the overexpressing gp130 clones (gp130 sense) showed no differences, compared with cells transfected with control vector. Thus, the present study provides new evidence supporting a link between gp130 and pituitary abnormal gro

Involvement of the gp130 cytokine transducer in MtT/S pituitary somatotroph tumour development in an autocrine-paracrine model

OBJECTIVE: gp130 cytokines are placed as auto-paracrine regulators of pituitary function, since they, as well as their receptors, have been shown to be expressed in and to act in normal and tumoral anterior pituitary cells. The objective of this work was to study their involvement in a model that shows the interaction between different cellular types that participate in a tumorigenic process. DESIGN: The dependence of a pituitary somatotrophic cell line (MtT/S) on a gp130 cytokine-producing folliculostellate (FS) cell line (TtT/GF) for tumorigenesis in vivo has been described. In order to study the participation of gp130 cytokines in the auto-paracrine stimulation of MtT/S growth, we generated MtT/S gp130 sense (gp130-S) and gp130 antisense (gp130-AS) clones stably transfected with pcDNA3/gp130 sense and pcDNA3/gp130 antisense vectors respectively. METHODS AND RESULTS: Functional characterization studies revealed that gp130-AS clones have an inhibited gp130 signalling, and proliferation studies showed that they have an impaired response to gp130 cytokines but respond normally to other independent stimuli. When injected into nude mice, MtT/S clones respond differently depending on cell number; at high concentrations MtT/S clones alone generated tumours equivalent in size to tumours derived from MtT/S plus TtT/GF cells. At low concentrations, MtT/S sense and control clones generated tumours of smaller size than tumours derived from these same clones plus TtT/GF cells, showing a dependence on FS cells. In both cases MtT/S gp130-AS clones had impaired tumour development. Furthermore, vessel density was significantly lower in tumours derived from gp130-AS plus TtT/GF cells. CONCLUSIONS: This study underlines the importance of gp130 cytokines in proliferation and establishes its role in auto-paracrine pituitary growth regulation.Fil: Graciarena, Mariana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires. Fundación Instituto Leloir. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias; ArgentinaFil: Carbia Nagashima, Alberto Nicolas. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias; ArgentinaFil: Onofri, Chiara. Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry; AlemaniaFil: Perez Castro, Carolina Ines. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias; ArgentinaFil: Giacomini, Damiana Paula. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires. Fundación Instituto Leloir. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Renner, Ulrich. Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry; AlemaniaFil: Stalla, Günter K.. Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry; AlemaniaFil: Arzt, Eduardo Simon. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias; Argentin