1878850
Information Brokering on the World Wide Web
Information Brokering is the process of collecting and re-distributing information. As the rich but unstructured sea of data that comprises the World Wide Web continues to grow, so too will the demand for information brokering services. This paper outlines a methodology and an architecture to support information brokering on the Web. Specifically, the two innovations which are described facilitate the construction and distribution of customized views that integrate data from a number of Web sources. An original technique is presented for the extraction of data from the Web and a solution based on JavaScript and HTML is presented to support the embedding of SQL queries within Web documents.
45512564
Constraint-driven hierarchical information extraction
This abstract summarizes a propsal to use semistructured constraints as a general framework for information extraction. The proposal builds on the intuition that written documents tend to contain a great deal of redundancy: Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them. While current methods overlook or eliminate redundancy, we seek to explicitly represent and exploit both repetition and other natural patterns in semistructured text. We summarize our early research on verification, outline current and future directions, and identify related work. Our initial work assumes knowledge of both document structure and its attendant constraints for the purpose of extraction verification. Specifically, semantic and structural constraints are used to check wrapper accuracy. For example, a structural constraint might ensure that the parties to a contract are introduced at the beginning of the document. A foreign-key constraint checks whether the parties are included on a list of approved signers. That signatories are repeated at the end of a contract is represented by an inverse constraint. A wrapper to extract seven attributes from legal arbitration decisions was applied to 200 cases. Constraint-based verification produced only ten false negatives, the majority of which were due to errors in wrapper delimiters. Further results were reported earlier [Hunter, et al., 2002]. We are currently experimenting with semistructured constraints in hierarchical extraction. Documents with the same semantic and structural constraints are placed in the same class. Class-specific routines fragment the document, extract from each fragment, and recurse on selected components. We propose the use of semistructured constraints as a framework for both fragmentation and extraction. For example, in addition to simple features like HTML-nesting, constraints can dictate whether certain values or structural properties functionally determine other fragments. A dissenting opinion must correspond to a legal decision with more than one judge.
28008024
Multiresolution Remeshing Using Weighted Centroidal Voronoi Diagram
We present a novel method for multiresolution remeshing of irregular mesh. First, the original mesh (two-manifold any genus) is decomposed into several patches, each patch is homeomorphic to a 2D triangle. The goal of this decomposition process is that the decomposed patches are size-equally. First, a mesh is manually cut into a few disk-like patches. With the help of weighted centroidal Voronoi diagram (WCVD), each patch is then automatically partitioned into more triangular patches with nearly equal size. Recursively subdividing these triangular patches, we finally get a semi-regular mesh.
2587142
Using tone information in Cantonese continuous speech recognition
In Chinese languages, tones carry important information at various linguistic levels. This research is based on the belief that tone information, if acquired accurately and utilized effectively, contributes to the automatic speech recognition of Chinese. In particular, we focus on the Cantonese dialect, which is spoken by tens of millions of people in Southern China and Hong Kong. Cantonese is well known for its complicated tone system, which makes automatic tone recognition very difficult. This article describes an effective approach to explicit tone recognition of Cantonese in continuously spoken utterances. Tone feature vectors are derived, on a short-time basis, to characterize the syllable-wide patterns of F0 (fundamental frequency) and energy movements. A moving-window normalization technique is proposed to reduce the tone-irrelevant fluctuation of F0 and energy features. Hidden Markov models are employed for context-dependent acoustic modeling of different tones. A tone recognition accuracy of 66.4% has been achieved in the speaker-independent case. The recognized tone patterns are then utilized to assist Cantonese large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) via a lattice expansion approach. Experimental results show that reliable tone information helps to improve the overall performance of LVCSR.
42876940
An HMM-based speech recognition IC
This paper presents the design, simulation and measurement results of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based isolated word recognizer IC with double mixtures. Table look-up technique is employed in this design. The chip operates at 20 MHz at 3.3 V. The recognition time is 0.5 s for a 50-word speech library. The speech IC has been verified with 467 test speech data and the recognition accuracy is 93.8%. A reference software recognizer using the same algorithm and speech library has a recognition accuracy of 94.2%. The new speech IC that uses a table look up to reduce the complexity of the circuit has approximately the same recognition accuracy as an ideal software recognizer.
8163714
Scaling Laws in Natural Scenes and the Inference of 3D Shape
This paper explores the statistical relationship between natural images and their underlying range (depth) images. We look at how this relationship changes over scale, and how this information can be used to enhance low resolution range data using a full resolution intensity image. Based on our findings, we propose an extension to an existing technique known as shape recipes [3], and the success of the two methods are compared using images and laser scans of real scenes. Our extension is shown to provide a two-fold improvement over the current method. Furthermore, we demonstrate that ideal linear shape-from-shading filters, when learned from natural scenes, may derive even more strength from shadow cues than from the traditional linear-Lambertian shading cues.
44493552
Adaptation of the temporal receptive fields of macaque V1 neurons
Abstract Traditional view of macaque V1 neurons is that they are static spatiotemporal filters. This study shows that V1 neurons’ temporal receptive fields (kernels) are dynamic and adaptive. In order to study the adaptation of the kernels to a variety of stimuli, we developed a regression approach to recover kernels using naturalistic stimuli. Using this technique, we studied how the kernels of the V1 neurons in macaque monkeys adapt to the frequency bandwidth of naturalistic signals. We found that the temporal frequency tunings and the gains of the receptive fields of the neurons change according to the statistical context of the stimulus environment.