1,077 research outputs found

    Phoneme Recognition Using Acoustic Events

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    This paper presents a new approach to phoneme recognition using nonsequential sub--phoneme units. These units are called acoustic events and are phonologically meaningful as well as recognizable from speech signals. Acoustic events form a phonologically incomplete representation as compared to distinctive features. This problem may partly be overcome by incorporating phonological constraints. Currently, 24 binary events describing manner and place of articulation, vowel quality and voicing are used to recognize all German phonemes. Phoneme recognition in this paradigm consists of two steps: After the acoustic events have been determined from the speech signal, a phonological parser is used to generate syllable and phoneme hypotheses from the event lattice. Results obtained on a speaker--dependent corpus are presented.Comment: 4 pages, to appear at ICSLP'94, PostScript version (compressed and uuencoded

    Results of cholecystectomies 2003-2010 in a small hospital in Iceland

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    Tilgangur: Gallblöðrutaka er ein af algengustu aðgerðunum í almennum skurðlækningum. Tilgangur rannsóknarinnar var að meta árangur gallblöðrutöku á Heilbrigðisstofnun Vesturlands (HVE) á Akranesi. Efniviður og aðferðir: Rannsóknin var afturskyggn og tók til allra sjúklinga sem gengust undir gallblöðrutöku á HVE á Akranesi frá 1. janúar 2003 til 31. desember 2010. Upplýsingum var safnað úr sjúkraskrám af á HVE Akranesi, Landspítala og Domus Medica. Niðurstöður: 378 sjúklingar gengust undir gallblöðrutöku á tímabilinu, þar af 280 konur (74%) og var meðalaldur 49,6 ár. Aðgerðirnar voru að meirihluta valaðgerðir (87%) og var aðgerðartími 46 mínútur (miðgildi, bil: 17-240). Legutími var 2 dagar (miðgildi, bil: 1-31). Röntgenmyndataka af gallvegum í aðgerð var framkvæmd hjá 93 af 378 sjúklingum (25%). Röntgenrannsókn á gallvegum og brisgangi með holsjá var síðar framkvæmd hjá 22 af þeim 93 sjúklingum (23%) vegna gallsteina í megingallrás. Tveimur aðgerðum var breytt yfir í opna aðgerð (0,5%).Tíðni alvarlegra fylgikvilla var 2,4%, þar af fengu fjórir (1,1%) sjúklingar djúpa sýkingu og 5 (1,3%) fengu gallleka. Sjúklingar með sögu um gallblöðrubólgu voru marktækt líklegri til að fá alvarlega fylgikvilla (p=0,007). Enduraðgerð var framkvæmd hjá þremur sjúklingum vegna gallleka. Enginn sjúklingur hlaut alvarlegan skaða á gallrás. Enginn sjúklingur lést af völdum aðgerðar. Eftirlit var framkvæmt fjórum vikum eftir aðgerð hjá 254 sjúklingum (67%) en af þeim höfðu 13 (5%) væg einkenni frá kviðarholi. Ályktun: Árangur af gallblöðrutökum á HVE á Akranesi er mjög góður og vel sambærilegur við árangur sem greint er frá í fyrri rannsóknum bæði hérlendis og erlendis. Abstract AIM: Cholecystectomy is a common procedure in general surgery. The aim of this study was to retrospectivly assess the results of cholecystectomies performed in Akranes Hospital (AH), a small hospital in Iceland. MATERIAL AND METHODS: This retrospective study included all patients that underwent a cholecystectomy in AH from 1 January 2003 to 31 December 2010. Patient records were reviewed from AH, as well as from Landspitali University Hospital and Domus Medica. RESULTS: 378 operations were performed. 74% of the patients were women and the mean age was 49.6 years. The majority of operations were elective (87%) and the median operative time was 46 minutes (range: 17-240). The median length of stay was 2 days (range: 1-31). Intra-operative cholangiography (IOC) was performed in 93 of 378 patients (25%). Endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography, ERCP, was performed consecutively in 22 of those 93 patients (23%). The conversion rate to open surgery was 0.5%. The rate of serious complications was 2.4% of which four (1.1%) patients had a deep infection and 5 (1.3%) had a bile leakage postoperatively. Patients with cholecystitis had an increased risk of serious complications (p=0.007). Reoperation was performed on three patients who had bile leakage. No patient had a serious bile duct injury and mortality was 0%. 254 (67%) patients had 4 week control postoperatively where 13 patients (5%) had mild gastrointestinal symptoms. CONCLUSION: The results of cholecystectomies in AH are very good and comparable to the results of national and international studies. Key words: laparoscopic cholecystectomy, intra-operative cholangiography, choledocholithiasis, endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography, complications. Correspondence: Marta Ros Berndsen, [email protected]

    Lattice score based data cleaning for phrase-based statistical machine translation

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    Statistical machine translation relies heavily on parallel corpora to train its models for translation tasks. While more and more bilingual corpora are readily available, the quality of the sentence pairs should be taken into consideration. This paper presents a novel lattice score-based data cleaning method to select proper sentence pairs from the ones extracted from a bilingual corpus by the sentence alignment methods. The proposed method is carried out as follows: firstly, an initial phrasebased model is trained on the full sentencealigned corpus; then for each of the sentence pairs in the corpus, word alignments are used to create anchor pairs and sourceside lattices; thirdly, based on the translation model, target-side phrase networks are expanded on the lattices and Viterbi searching is used to find approximated decoding results; finally, BLEU score thresholds are used to filter out the low-score sentence pairs for the data cleaning purpose. Our experiments on the FBIS corpus showed improvements of BLEU score from 23.78 to 24.02 in Chinese-English

    Dilaton Stabilization in Brane Gas Cosmology

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    Brane Gas Cosmology is an M-theory motivated attempt to reconcile aspects of the standard cosmology based on Einstein's theory of general relativity. Dilaton gravity, when incorporating winding p-brane states, has verified the Brandenberger--Vafa mechanism --a string-motivated conjecture which explains why only three of the nine spatial dimensions predicted by string theory grow large. Further investigation of this mechanism has argued for a hierarchy of subspaces, and has shown the internal directions to be stable to initial perturbations. These results, however, are dependent on a rolling dilaton, or varying strength of Newton's gravitational constant. In these proceedings we show that it is not possible to stabilize the dilaton and maintain the stability of the internal directions within the standard Brane Gas Cosmology setup.Comment: 6 pages, no figures. To appear in the Proceedings of MRST 2004, held at Concordia University, Montreal, QC, 12-14 May 200

    Liquidity Coverage Ratio in a Payments Network: Uncovering Contagion Paths

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    The Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) requirement of the Basel III framework is aimed at making banks more resilient against liquidity shocks and indicates the extent to which a bank is able to meet its payment obligations over a 30-day stress period. Notwithstanding the fact that it forms an important addition to the available information for regulators, it presents information on the status of a single bank on a monthly reporting basis. In this paper we generate an LCR-like statistic on a daily basis and simulate liquidity failure of each of the systemically important banks, using historical payments data from TARGET2. The aim of the paper is to uncover paths of contagion. The trigger is a bank with a deteriorating LCR and the knock-on effect is modelled as the impact on the LCR of other banks. We generate then the cascade of contagion, which in general consists of multiple paths, trying to answer the question to what extent the financial network further deteriorates. In doing so we provide paths of contagion which give a sense of potential systemic risk present in the network. We find that the majority of damage is caused by a small group of large banks. Furthermore we find groups of banks that are very vulnerable to shocks, regardless of the size or location of the disruption. Our model reveals that the shortfall of liquidity at the stressed bank is a more important driver than the addition of liquidity at the other banks. A version of the contagion network based on a 14-day period reveals a monthly pattern, which is in line with other literature in which window dressing is addressed. The data used in this paper are available to supervisors, central banks and resolution authorities, therefore making it possible to anticipate contagion of failing liquidity coverage within their payment network on a daily basis

    Using same-language machine translation to create alternative target sequences for text-to-speech synthesis

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    Modern speech synthesis systems attempt to produce speech utterances from an open domain of words. In some situations, the synthesiser will not have the appropriate units to pronounce some words or phrases accurately but it still must attempt to pronounce them. This paper presents a hybrid machine translation and unit selection speech synthesis system. The machine translation system was trained with English as the source and target language. Rather than the synthesiser only saying the input text as would happen in conventional synthesis systems, the synthesiser may say an alternative utterance with the same meaning. This method allows the synthesiser to overcome the problem of insufficient units in runtime

    Five Fundamental Questions on Central Counterparties

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    Central counterparties (CCPs) are designed to reduce aggregate counterparty credit risk and function as market infrastructures for capital markets in securities and derivatives. Although CCPs, also known as clearing houses, exist for well over a century, they have gained prominence since they became the main international public policy response to the Lehman crisis of making over-the-counter derivative transactions safer. This G20's response to the Lehman crisis of making central clearing mandatory for standardized over-the-counter derivative transactions has been translated into law, Dodd-Frank for the US and EMIR for the EU. However, CCPs remain to some extent controversial with adversaries claiming that they potentially increase systemic risk and proponents viewing them as systemic risk reducing when properly designed and maintained. In this article I review the booming literature on CCPs, of which about 60% is published in the last five years, by asking five fundamental questions about CCPs. The aim is to construct a broad, academically substantiated, synthesis about CCPs and to propose directions for future research in what can be considered as the most important niche of financial economics
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