All Politics is Local: The Renminbi's Prospects as a Future Global Currency

. In this article we describe methods for improving the RWTH German speech recognizer used within the VERBMOBIL project. In particular, we present acceleration methods for the search based on both within-word and across-word phoneme models. We also study incremental methods to reduce the response time of the online speech recognizer. Finally, we present experimental off-line results for the three VERBMOBIL scenarios. We report on word error rates and real-time factors for both speaker independent and speaker dependent recognition. 1 Introduction The goal of the VERBMOBIL project is to develop a speech-to-speech translation system that performs close to real-time. In this system, speech recognition is followed by subsequent VERBMOBIL modules (like syntactic analysis and translation) which depend on the recognition result. Therefore, in this application it is particularly important to keep the recognition time as short as possible. There are VERBMOBIL modules which are capable to work ..

Female breast cancer in New South Wales, Australia, by country of birth: implications for health-service delivery.

Background NSW has a multicultural population with increasing migration from South East Asia, the Western Pacific and Eastern Mediterranean. Objective To compare cancer stage, treatment (first 12 months) and survival for 12 country of birth (COB) categories recorded on the population-based NSW Cancer Registry. Design Historic cohort study of invasive breast cancers diagnosed in 2003–2016. Patients Data for 48,909 women (18+ ages) analysed using linked cancer registry, hospital inpatient and Medicare and pharmaceutical benefits claims data. Measurement Comparisons by COB using multivariate logistic regression and proportional hazards regression with follow-up of vital status to April 30th, 2020. Results Compared with the Australia-born, women born in China, the Philippines, Vietnam and Lebanon were younger at diagnosis, whereas those from the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Greece were older. Women born in China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Greece and Italy lived in less advantaged areas. Adjusted analyses indicated that: (1) stage at diagnosis was less localised for women born in Germany, Greece, Italy and Lebanon; (2) a lower proportion reported comorbidity for those born in China, the Philippines and Vietnam; (3) surgery type varied, with mastectomy more likely for women born in China, the Philippines and Vietnam, and less likely for women born in Italy, Greece and Lebanon; (4) radiotherapy was more likely where breast conserving surgery was more common (Greece, Italy, and Lebanon) and the United Kingdom; and (5) systemic drug therapy was less common for women born in China and Germany. Five-year survival in NSW was high by international standards and increasing. Adjusted analyses indicate that, compared with the Australian born, survival from death from cancer at 5 years from diagnosis was higher for women born in China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Italy, the United Kingdom and Greece. Conclusions There is diversity by COB of stage, treatment and survival. Reasons for survival differences may include cultural factors and healthier migrant populations with lower comorbidity, and potentially, less complete death recording in Australia if some women return to their birth countries for treatment and end-of-life care. More research is needed to explore the cultural and clinical factors that health services need to accommodate

Thermodynamic Comparison of Organic Rankine Cycles Employing Liquid-Flooded Expansion or a Solution Circuit

Two modifications to a conventional Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) are investigated: an Organic Rankine Cycle with Liquid-Flooded Expansion (ORCLFE), and an Organic Rankine Cycle with Solution Circuit (ORCSC). The ORCLFE involves “flooding” the expansion device with a liquid that is in thermal equilibrium with the primary working fluid, while simultaneously expanding the primary working fluid through the same device. The ORCSC employs a zeotropic mixture consisting of two components with a large boiling point difference. The more volatile component in the vapor phase is separated from the absorbent in the liquid phase; the vapor then flows through the expansion device, whereas the liquid absorbent gives rise to a regenerative solution circuit. A thermodynamic model is used to compare these modified ORCs with conventional ORC technology for a range of working fluids including ammonia, water, CO2, acetone, pentane, R134a and R245fa. The working fluid pairs considered for the ORCSC are ammoniaewater and CO2eacetone. Based purely on thermodynamic considerations, the conventional ORC using water as the working fluid is found to be more efficient than ORCs that use other working fluids. It yields almost 65% of the Carnot efficiency for a source and sink temperature of 200C and 20C, respectively. However, the use of water requires low expander exhaust quality, large pressure ratios, and a large expander due to its low density at the expander exhaust. Thus, the practical challenges of using water as a working fluid at typical ORC input temperatures may make its use prohibitive. The ORCLFE always leads to improved cycle efficiency when compared to an ORC for a given working fluid, but it requires the use of a positive displacement expander. The ORCSC shows the lowest efficiencies for the working fluid pairs studied. There are significant practical advantages intrinsic to both the ORCLFE and the ORCSC. For example, the more isothermal expansion of the ORCLFE eliminates the concern of low expander exhaust quality for wet working fluids. The ORCSC provides the ability to use the two-phase temperature glide to match source and sink temperature profiles, facilitates intrinsic capacity control, and can have significantly lower working pressures than an ORC. Ultimately, the overall best choice of cycle and working fluid is highly application-specific and should balance the tradeoffs between efficiency and practical concerns. The thermodynamic analysis presented in this work represents a step toward identifying an optimal ORC solution for an application where the temperature glides of the source and sink fluids are sufficiently small to approximate a thermal energy reservoir

The MGB Challenge: Evaluating Multi-genre Broadcast Media Recognition

This paper describes the Multi-Genre Broadcast (MGB) Challenge at ASRU 2015, an evaluation focused on speech recognition, speaker diarization, and "lightly supervised" alignment of BBC TV recordings. The challenge training data covered the whole range of seven weeks BBC TV output across four channels, resulting in about 1,600 hours of broadcast audio. In addition several hundred million words of BBC subtitle text was provided for language modelling. A novel aspect of the evaluation was the exploration of speech recognition and speaker diarization in a longitudinal setting - i.e. recognition of several episodes of the same show, and speaker diarization across these episodes, linking speakers. The longitudinal tasks also offered the opportunity for systems to make use of supplied metadata including show title, genre tag, and date/time of transmission. This paper describes the task data and evaluation process used in the MGB challenge, and summarises the results obtained

Mucosal Application of gp140 Encoding DNA Polyplexes to Different Tissues Results in Altered Immunological Outcomes in Mice

Increasing evidence suggests that mucosally targeted vaccines will enhance local humoral and cellular responses whilst still eliciting systemic immunity. We therefore investigated the capacity of nasal, sublingual or vaginal delivery of DNA-PEI polyplexes to prime immune responses prior to mucosal protein boost vaccination. Using a plasmid expressing the model antigen HIV CN54gp140 we show that each of these mucosal surfaces were permissive for DNA priming and production of antigen-specific antibody responses. The elicitation of systemic immune responses using nasally delivered polyplexed DNA followed by recombinant protein boost vaccination was equivalent to a systemic prime-boost regimen, but the mucosally applied modality had the advantage in that significant levels of antigen-specific IgA were detected in vaginal mucosal secretions. Moreover, mucosal vaccination elicited both local and systemic antigen-specific IgG(+) and IgA(+) antibody secreting cells. Finally, using an Influenza challenge model we found that a nasal or sublingual, but not vaginal, DNA prime/protein boost regimen protected against infectious challenge. These data demonstrate that mucosally applied plasmid DNA complexed to PEI followed by a mucosal protein boost generates sufficient antigen-specific humoral antibody production to protect from mucosal viral challenge

Automatic transcription of multi-genre media archives

This paper describes some recent results of our collaborative work on developing a speech recognition system for the automatic transcription or media archives from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The material includes a wide diversity of shows with their associated metadata. The latter are highly diverse in terms of completeness, reliability and accuracy. First, we investigate how to improve lightly supervised acoustic training, when timestamp information is inaccurate and when speech deviates significantly from the transcription, and how to perform evaluations when no reference transcripts are available. An automatic timestamp correction method as well as a word and segment level combination approaches between the lightly supervised transcripts and the original programme scripts are presented which yield improved metadata. Experimental results show that systems trained using the improved metadata consistently outperform those trained with only the original lightly supervised decoding hypotheses. Secondly, we show that the recognition task may benefit from systems trained on a combination of in-domain and out-of-domain data. Working with tandem HMMs, we describe Multi-level Adaptive Networks, a novel technique for incorporating information from out-of domain posterior features using deep neural network. We show that it provides a substantial reduction in WER over other systems including a PLP-based baseline, in-domain tandem features, and the best out-of-domain tandem features.This research was supported by EPSRC Programme Grant EP/I031022/1 (Natural Speech Technology).This paper was presented at the First Workshop on Speech, Language and Audio in Multimedia, August 22-23, 2013; Marseille. It was published in CEUR Workshop Proceedings at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1012/