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.
15210668
A Music Retrieval System Based on Query-by-Singing for Karaoke Jukebox
This paper investigates the problem of retrieving Karaoke music by singing. The Karaoke music encompasses two audio channels in each track: one is a mix of vocal and background accompaniment, and the other is composed of accompaniment only. The accompaniments in the two channels often resemble each other, but are not identical. This characteristic is exploited to infer the vocal’s background music from the accompaniment-only channel, so that the main melody underlying the vocal signals can be extracted more effectively. To enable an efficient and accurate search for a large music database, we propose a phrase onset detection method based on Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) for predicting the most likely beginning of a sung query, and adopt a multiple-level multiple-pass Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) for melody similarity comparison. The experiments conducted on a Karaoke database consisting of 1,071 popular songs show the promising results of query-by-singing retrieval for Karaoke music.
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.
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.
7772067
Extractive Chinese Spoken Document Summarization Using Probabilistic Ranking Models
The purpose of extractive summarization is to automatically select indicative sentences, passages, or paragraphs from an original document according to a certain target summarization ratio, and then sequence them to form a concise summary. In this paper, in contrast to conventional approaches, our objective is to deal with the extractive summarization problem under a probabilistic modeling framework. We investigate the use of the hidden Markov model (HMM) for spoken document summarization, in which each sentence of a spoken document is treated as an HMM for generating the document, and the sentences are ranked and selected according to their likelihoods. In addition, the relevance model (RM) of each sentence, estimated from a contemporary text collection, is integrated with the HMM model to improve the representation of the sentence model. The experiments were performed on Chinese broadcast news compiled in Taiwan. The proposed approach achieves noticeable performance gains over conventional summarization approaches.
7895439
An efficient rate-distortion optimal shape coding approach utilizing a skeleton-based decomposition
In this paper, we present a new shape-coding approach, which decouples the shape information into two independent signal data sets; the skeleton and the boundary distance from the skeleton. The major benefit of this approach is that it allows for a more flexible tradeoff between approximation error and bit budget. Curves of arbitrary order can be utilized for approximating both the skeleton and distance signals. For a given bit budget for a video frame, we solve the problem of choosing the number and location of the control points for all skeleton and distance signals of all boundaries within a frame, so that the overall distortion is minimized. An operational rate-distortion (ORD) optimal approach using Lagrangian relaxation and a four-dimensional direct acyclic graph (DAG) shortest path algorithm is developed for solving the problem. To reduce the computational complexity from O(N(5)) to O(N(3)), where N is the number of admissible control points for a skeleton, a suboptimal greedy-trellis search algorithm is proposed and compared with the optimal algorithm. In addition, an even more efficient algorithm with computational complexity O(N(2)) that finds an ORD optimal solution using a relaxed distortion criterion is also proposed and compared with the optimal solution. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approaches outperform existing ORD optimal approaches, which do not follow the same decomposition of the source data.
1492261
Object Tracking with Particle Filter Using Color Information
Color-based particle filter for object tracking has been an active research topic in recent years. Despite great efforts of many researchers, there still remains to be solved the problem of contradiction between efficiency and robustness. The paper makes an attempt to partially solve this problem. Firstly, the Integral Histogram Image is introduced by which histogram of any rectangle region can be computed at negligible cost. However, straightforward application of the Integral Histogram Images causes the problem of “curse of dimensionality”. In addition, traditional histogram is inefficient and inaccurate. Thus we propose to adaptively determine histogram bins based on K-Means clustering, which can represent color distribution of object more compactly and accurately with as a small number of bins. Thanks to the Integral Histogram Images and the clustering based color histogram, we finally achieve a fast and robust particle filter algorithm for object tracking. Experiments show that the performance of the algorithm is encouraging.
1845237
Empirical comparison of various reinforcement learning strategies for sequential targeted marketing
We empirically evaluate the performance of various reinforcement learning methods in applications to sequential targeted marketing. In particular we propose and evaluate a progression of reinforcement learning methods, ranging from the "direct" or "batch" methods to "indirect" or "simulation based" methods, and those that we call "semidirect" methods that fall between them. We conduct a number of controlled experiments to evaluate the performance of these competing methods. Our results indicate that while the indirect methods can perform better in a situation in which nearly perfect modeling is possible, under the more realistic situations in which the system's modeling parameters have restricted attention, the indirect methods' performance tend to degrade. We also show that semi-direct methods are effective in reducing the amount of computation necessary to attain a given level of performance, and often result in more profitable policies.
12957954
Agents and Web Services Supported Business Exception Management
The unpredictability of business processes requires that business applications support exception management with the ability to dynamically adapt to the changing environment. Exception management is a kind of complex process, in which multiple organizations and mixture of human activities and automated tasks may be involved. For a competitive solution to exception management, a web services and agents supported approach is elaborated in this paper. Agent technology is applied to deal with the dynamic, complex, and distributed processes in exception management; web services techniques are proposed for more scalability and interoperability in network-based business environment. By integrating knowledge-based agents with web services to make use of the advantages from both, this approach leads to more intelligence, flexibility and collaboration in business exception management. A case of exception management in securities trading is developed to demonstrate the validity and benefits of this approach.
10547222
A Hybrid Ontology Directed Feedback Selection Algorithm for Supporting Creative Problem Solving Dialogues
We evaluate a new hybrid language processing approach designed for interactive applications that maintain an interaction with users over multiple turns. Specifically, we describe a method for using a simple topic hierarchy in combination with a standard information retrieval measure of semantic similarity to reason about the selection of appropriate feedback in response to extended language inputs in the context of an interactive tutorial system designed to support creative problem solving. Our evaluation demonstrates the value of using a machine learning approach that takes feedback from experts into account for optimizing the hierarchy based feedback selection strategy.