10539492
On the extraction of vocal-related information to facilitate the management of popular music collections
With the explosive growth of networked collections of musical material, there is a need to establish a mechanism like a digital library to manage music data. This paper presents a content-based processing paradigm of popular song collections to facilitate the realization of a music digital library. The paradigm is built on the automatic extraction of information of interest from music audio signals. Because the vocal part is often the heart of a popular song, we focus on developing techniques to exploit the solo vocal signals underlying an accompanied performance. This supports the necessary functions of a music digital library, namely, music data organization, music information retrieval/recommendation, and copyright protection
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
8764300
MDPE: A Very Robust Estimator for Model Fitting and Range Image Segmentation
In this paper, we propose a novel and highly robust estimator, called MDPE1 (Maximum Density Power Estimator). This estimator applies nonparametric density estimation and density gradient estimation techniques in parametric estimation (“model fitting”). MDPE optimizes an objective function that measures more than just the size of the residuals. Both the density distribution of data points in residual space and the size of the residual corresponding to the local maximum of the density distribution, are considered as important characteristics in our objective function. MDPE can tolerate more than 85% outliers. Compared with several other recently proposed similar estimators, MDPE has a higher robustness to outliers and less error variance.We also present a new range image segmentation algorithm, based on a modified version of the MDPE (Quick-MDPE), and its performance is compared to several other segmentation methods. Segmentation requires more than a simple minded application of an estimator, no matter how good that estimator is: our segmentation algorithm overcomes several difficulties faced with applying a statistical estimator to this task.
14662588
Bisimulation analysis of SDL-expressed protocols: a case study
Faster, better networks algorithms are often being discovered, and it is desirable to be able to replace an old algorithm by a new in a manner that is completely transparent to the application using it. This paper investigates the technique for ensuring such transparency for protocols expressed in SDL, via bisimulation checking. We discuss the main issues involved in translating SDL into Concurrency Workbench, a tool for performing bisimulation checking, and illustrate the feasibility of the technique by comparing the SDL specification of the Go-Back N protocol with the family of new protocols, called Asynchronous Retransmission Go-Back- N (AR). The latter perform better in environments characterized by high error rates and/or large propagation delays.
9669585
Conceptual construction on incomplete survey data
The raw survey data for data mining are often incomplete. The issues of missing data in knowledge discovery are often ignored in data mining. This article presents the conceptual foundations of data mining with incomplete survey data, and proposes query processing for knowledge discovery and a set of query functions for the conceptual construction in survey data mining. Through a case, this paper demonstrates that conceptual construction on incomplete data can be accomplished by using artificial intelligence tools such as self-organizing maps.
27642253
A multi-dimensional histogram for selectivity estimation and fast approximate query answering
Histograms have been widely used for selectivity estimation in query optimization, as well as for fast approximate query answering in many data mining, OLAP, and data visualization applications. This paper presents a new type of multi-dimensional histogram, the multi-dimensional VI histogram. Unlike other types of multi-dimensional histograms, which are seldom used in practice due to their high construction costs, the multi-dimensional VI histogram can be constructed in just one scan through the data. Through a set of experiments, we show that the multi-dimensional VI histogram is capable of providing more accurate estimations than the techniques currently used in major commercial database management systems, including IBM DB2, Oracle Database, and Microsoft SQL Server.
16600904
A services oriented framework for next generation data analysis centers
Over the past decade, advances in computational and sensor technology have enabled us to dynamically collect vast amounts of data from observations, health screening tests, simulations, and experiments at an ever-increasing pace. Knowledge discovery and data mining is an iterative process concerned with deriving interesting, non-obvious, and useful patterns and models from such large volumes of data. Although inexpensive storage is conducive to maintaining said data, accessing and managing it for knowledge discovery and data mining becomes a performance issue when datasets are large, dynamic, and distributed. In this work, we present our vision of a software framework consisting of middleware services to support interactive data mining over dynamic data at data analysis centers built on top of heterogeneous clusters. The design of a sampling service for dynamic data, together with initial performance results, are also presented.