3126850
Recent innovations in speech-to-text transcription at SRI-ICSI-UW
We summarize recent progress in automatic speech-to-text transcription at SRI, ICSI, and the University of Washington. The work encompasses all components of speech modeling found in a state-of-the-art recognition system, from acoustic features, to acoustic modeling and adaptation, to language modeling. In the front end, we experimented with nonstandard features, including various measures of voicing, discriminative phone posterior features estimated by multilayer perceptrons, and a novel phone-level macro-averaging for cepstral normalization. Acoustic modeling was improved with combinations of front ends operating at multiple frame rates, as well as by modifications to the standard methods for discriminative Gaussian estimation. We show that acoustic adaptation can be improved by predicting the optimal regression class complexity for a given speaker. Language modeling innovations include the use of a syntax-motivated almost-parsing language model, as well as principled vocabulary-selection techniques. Finally, we address portability issues, such as the use of imperfect training transcripts, and language-specific adjustments required for recognition of Arabic and Mandarin
5616933
Techniques for effective vocabulary selection
The vocabulary of a continuous speech recognition (CSR) system is a significant factor in determining its performance. In this paper, we present three principled approaches to select the target vocabulary for a particular domain by trading off between the target out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rate and vocabulary size. We evaluate these approaches against an ad-hoc baseline strategy. Results are presented in the form of OOV rate graphs plotted against increasing vocabulary size for each technique.
3251955
Containment join size estimation: models and methods
Recent years witnessed an increasing interest in researches in XML, partly due to the fact that XML has now become the de facto standard for data interchange over the internet. A large amount of work has been reported on XML storage models and query processing techniques. However, few works have addressed issues of XML query optimization. In this paper, we report our study on one of the challenges in XML query optimization: containment join size estimation. Containment join is well accepted as an important operation in XML query processing. Estimating the size of its results is no doubt essential to generate efficient XML query processing plans. We propose two models, the interval model and the position model, and a set of estimation methods based on these two models. Comprehensive performance studies were conducted. The results not only demonstrate the advantages of our new algorithms over existing algorithms, but also provide valuable insights into the tradeoff among various parameters.
15045713
Visual Specification and Optimization of XQuery Using VXQ
As the popularity of XML increases, the need for querying collections of XML data from various systems becomes imperative. Proposed by W3C, XQuery is becoming a standard for querying such systems. However, the complexity of XQuery prevents its usage by broad audience. This paper proposes a visual XQuery specification language called VXQ to address this issue. By intuitive abstractions of XML and XQuery, the proposed system can generate XQueries for users that have little knowledge about the language. We show that our visual language is more expressive than previous proposals. Finally, we extend our proposed visual XQuery to support query rewriting and optimization for multiple XQuery systems.
45287219
Internet dependency and psychosocial maturity among college students
One salient impact of information technology on students' lives is the ever-increasing use of the Internet. Although there exist many reports in the media regarding the unhealthy Internet use among students, research is still limited and has mainly relied upon on-line self-selected reports on Internet dependency or “Internet addiction”. This paper attempts to look into the alleged Internet dependency within the Eriksonian psychosocial development framework. The results of a survey of the Internet use among 217 students in an Australian regional university are reported. The measures of patterns of the Internet use were correlated with that of psychosocial maturity and self-efficacy. The results showed that the Internet dependency seemed to be independent of the psychosocial maturity and the general perceived self-efficacy. A factor analysis extracted six factors from a set of 28 Internet experience-related questions and indicated that the Internet dependency could be of a multifaceted nature. The findings and their implications were discussed and a contextual perspective was proposed.
12798864
BASS: approximate search on large string databases
In this paper, we study the problem on how to build an index structure for large string databases to efficiently support various types of string matching without the necessity of mapping the substrings to a numerical space (e.g., string B-tree and MRS-index) nor the restriction of in-memory practice (e.g., suffix tree and suffix array). Towards this goal, we propose a new indexing scheme, BASS-tree, to efficiently support general approximate substring match (in terms of certain symbol substitutions and misalignments) in sublinear time on a large string database. The key idea behind the design is that all positions in each string are grouped recursively into a fully balanced tree according to the similarities of the subsequent segments starting at those positions. Each node is labeled with a regular expression that describes the commonality of the substrings indexed through the subtree. Any search can then be properly directed to the portion in the database with a high potential of matching quickly. With the BASS-tree in place, wild card(s) in the query pattern can also be handled in a seamless way. In addition, search of a long pattern can be decomposed into a series of searches of short segments followed by a process to join the results. It has been demonstrated in our experiments that the potential performance improvement brought by BASS-tree is in an order of magnitude over alternative methods.
15982467
On intrinsic representations of 3D polygons for shape blending
Abstract An intrinsic representation of a geometric object comprises a set of parameters that are invariant under Euclidean transformations and determine the shape and size of the object uniquely. Unlike the case of a two-dimensional polygon which has essentially only one intrinsic representation, a three-dimensional (3D) polygon allows several variations. We study three different intrinsic representations of a 3D polygon, focusing on properties regarding their applications in shape blending. We show that only one of these representations, which is a natural extension to the intrinsic functions of a 3D differentiable curve, is suitable for shape blending, while the others lead to discontinuous shape transformation. Detailed discussions about the evaluation criteria, numerical sensitivity, and an inherent difficulty in shape blending of 3D polygons are also presented.