451453
Mandarin spoken document retrieval based on syllable lattice matching
Abstract Spoken document retrieval (SDR) has been extensively studied in recent years because of its potential use in navigating large multi-media collections in the near future. Considering the characteristics and monosyllabic structure of the Chinese language, a syllable-based framework for retrieving Mandarin spoken documents using speech queries has been investigated. This paper presents a new syllable-based approach that is based on matching the whole syllable lattice directly instead of using the syllable and syllable-pair information extracted from the syllable lattice. The experimental results show that the retrieval performance can be improved significantly.
24553
Mandarin-English Information (MEI): investigating translingual speech retrieval
Abstract This paper describes the Mandarin–English Information (MEI) project, where we investigated the problem of cross-language spoken document retrieval (CL-SDR), and developed one of the first English–Chinese CL-SDR systems. Our system accepts an entire English news story (text) as query, and retrieves relevant Chinese broadcast news stories (audio) from the document collection. Hence, this is a cross-language and cross-media retrieval task. We applied a multi-scale approach to our problem, which unifies the use of phrases, words and subwords in retrieval. The English queries are translated into Chinese by means of a dictionary-based approach, where we have integrated phrase-based translation with word-by-word translation. Untranslatable named entities are transliterated by a novel subword translation technique. The multi-scale approach can be divided into three subtasks – multi-scale query formulation, multi-scale audio indexing (by speech recognition) and multi-scale retrieval. Experimental results demonstrate that the use of phrase-based translation and subword translation gave performance gains, and multi-scale retrieval outperforms word-based retrieval.
10755440
Syllable-Based Chinese Text/Spoken Document Retrieval Using Text/Speech Queries
In light of the rapid growth of Chinese information resources on the Internet, this study investigates a novel approach that deals with the problem of Chinese text and spoken document retrieval using both text and speech queries. By properly utilizing the monosyllabic structure of the Chinese language, the proposed approach estimates the statistical similarity between the text/speech queries and the text/spoken documents at the phonetic level using the syllable-based statistical information. The investigation successfully implemented a prototype system with an interface supporting some user-friendly functions and the initial test results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.
2984995
Query-By-Example Technique for Retrieving Cover Versions of Popular Songs with Similar Melodies
Retrieving audio material based on audio queries is an important and challenging issue in the research field of content-based access to popular music. As part of this research field, we present a preliminary investigation into retrieving cover versions of songs specified by users. The technique enables users to listen to songs with an identical tune, but performed by different singers, in different languages, genres, and so on. The proposed system is built on a query-by-example framework, which takes a fragment of the song submitted by the user as input, and returns songs similar to the query in terms of the main melody as output. To handle the likely discrepancies, e.g., tempos, transpositions, and accompaniments between cover versions and the original song, methods are presented to remove the non-vocal portions of the song, extract the sung notes from the accompanied vocals, and compare the similarities between the sung note sequences.
34060618
A Minimum Boundary Error Framework for Automatic Phonetic Segmentation
This paper presents a novel framework for HMM-based automatic phonetic segmentation that improves the accuracy of placing phone boundaries. In the framework, both training and segmentation approaches are proposed according to the minimum boundary error (MBE) criterion, which tries to minimize the expected boundary errors over a set of possible phonetic alignments. This framework is inspired by the recently proposed minimum phone error (MPE) training approach and the minimum Bayes risk decoding algorithm for automatic speech recognition. To evaluate the proposed MBE framework, we conduct automatic phonetic segmentation experiments on the TIMIT acoustic-phonetic continuous speech corpus. MBE segmentation with MBE-trained models can identify 80.53% of human-labeled phone boundaries within a tolerance of 10 ms, compared to 71.10% identified by conventional ML segmentation with ML-trained models. Moreover, by using the MBE framework, only 7.15% of automatically labeled phone boundaries have errors larger than 20 ms.
12580255
Comparison of Word and Subword Indexing Techniques for Mandarin Chinese Spoken Document Retrieval
In this paper, we investigate the use of words and subwords (including both characters and syllables) in audio indexing for Mandarin Chinese spoken document retrieval. Two retrieval approaches, including the well-known vector space model approach and the newly proposed HMM/Ngram-based approach, are used in the present work. We focus on the use of an entire Chinese textual story (from a newspaper) as a query to retrieve Mandarin Chinese spoken documents (from news broadcasts). Experiments are based on the Topic Detection and Tracking Corpora.
783838
Practical Indexing XML Document for Twig Query
Answering structural queries of XML with index is an important approach of efficient XML query processing. Among existing structural indexes for XML data, F&B index is the smallest index that can answer all branching queries. However, an F&B index for less regular XML data often contains a large number of index nodes, and hence a large amount of main memory. If the F&B index cannot be accommodated in the available memory, its performance will degrade significantly. This issue has practically limited wider application of the F&B index. 
 
In this paper, we propose a disk organization method for the F&B index which shift part of the leave nodes in the F&B index to the disk and organize them judiciously on the disk. Our method is based on the observation that the majority of the nodes in a F&B index is often the leaf nodes, yet their access frequencies are not high. 
 
We select some leaves to output to disk. With the support of reasonable storage structure in main memory and in disk, we design efficient query processing method). We further optimize the design of the F&B index based on the query workload. Experimental results verified the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
5266558
Resilient peer-to-peer streaming
We consider the problem of distributing "live" streaming media content to a potentially large and highly dynamic population of hosts. Peer-to-peer content distribution is attractive in this setting because the bandwidth available to serve content scales with demand. A key challenge, however, is making content distribution robust to peer transience. Our approach to providing robustness is to introduce redundance; both in network paths and in data. We use multiple, diverse distribution trees to provide redundancy in network paths and multiple description coding (MDC) to provide redundancy in data. We present a simple tree management algorithm that provides the necessary path diversity and describe an adaptation framework for MDC based on scalable receiver feedback. We evaluate these using MDC applied to real video data coupled with real usage traces from a major news site that experienced a large flash crowd for live streaming content. Our results show very significant benefits in using multiple distribution trees and MDC, with a 22 dB improvement in PSNR in some cases.
1582462
Suppressing model overfitting in mining concept-drifting data streams
Mining data streams of changing class distributions is important for real-time business decision support. The stream classifier must evolve to reflect the current class distribution. This poses a serious challenge. On the one hand, relying on historical data may increase the chances of learning obsolete models. On the other hand, learning only from the latest data may lead to biased classifiers, as the latest data is often an unrepresentative sample of the current class distribution. The problem is particularly acute in classifying rare events, when, for example, instances of the rare class do not even show up in the most recent training data. In this paper, we use a stochastic model to describe the concept shifting patterns and formulate this problem as an optimization one: from the historical and the current training data that we have observed, find the most-likely current distribution, and learn a classifier based on the most-likely distribution. We derive an analytic solution and approximate this solution with an efficient algorithm, which calibrates the influence of historical data carefully to create an accurate classifier. We evaluate our algorithm with both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our results show that our algorithm produces accurate and efficient classification.
1302015
An evaluation of scalable application-level multicast built using peer-to-peer overlays
Structured peer-to-peer overlay networks such as CAN, Chord, Pastry, and Tapestry can be used to implement Internet-scale application-level multicast. There are two general approaches to accomplishing this: tree building and flooding. This paper evaluates these two approaches using two different types of structured overlay: 1) overlays which use a form of generalized hypercube routing, e.g., Chord, Pastry and Tapestry, and 2) overlays which use a numerical distance metric to route through a Cartesian hyperspace, e.g., CAN. Pastry and CAN are chosen as the representatives of each type of overlay. To the best of our knowledge, this paper reports the first head-to-head comparison of CAN-style versus Pastry-style overlay networks, using multicast communication workloads running on an identical simulation infrastructure. The two approaches to multicast are independent of overlay network choice, and we provide a comparison of flooding versus tree-based multicast on both overlays. Results show that the tree-based approach consistently outperforms the flooding approach. Finally, for tree-based multicast, we show that Pastry provides better performance than CAN.
1927942
Tracking and segmenting people with occlusions by a sample consensus based method
One of the most difficult issues in visual tracking is to track people in groups, especially under occlusions. In this paper, we present a novel sample consensus based method, which utilizes both color and spatial information of human bodies, to model the appearance of people. We use this appearance model to segment and track people through occlusions. We show experimental results in several video sequences to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.