Part-of-Speech Tagging using Parallel Weighted Finite-State Transducers

We use parallel weighted finite-state transducers to implement a part-of-speech tagger, which obtains state-of-the-art accuracy when used to tag the Europarl corpora for Finnish, Swedish and English. Our system consists of a weighted lexicon and a guesser combined with a bigram model factored into two weighted transducers. We use both lemmas and tag sequences in the bigram model, which guarantees reliable bigram estimates.

Two stage iterative wiener filtering for speech enhancement

We formulate a two-stage Iterative Wiener filtering (IWF) approach to speech enhancement, bettering the performance of constrained IWF, reported in literature. The codebook constrained IWF (CCIWF) has been shown to be effective in achieving convergence of IWF in the presence of both stationary and non-stationary noise. To this, we include a second stage of unconstrained IWF and show that the speech enhancement performance can be improved in terms of average segmental SNR (SSNR), Itakura-Saito (IS) distance and Linear Prediction Coefficients (LPC) parameter coincidence. We also explore the tradeoff between the number of CCIWF iterations and the second stage IWF iterations.

RIESZ-TRANSFORM-BASED DEMODULATION OF NARROWBAND SPECTROGRAMS OF VOICED SPEECH

Narrowband spectrograms of voiced speech can be modeled as an outcome of two-dimensional (2-D) modulation process. In this paper, we develop a demodulation algorithm to estimate the 2-D amplitude modulation (AM) and carrier of a given spectrogram patch. The demodulation algorithm is based on the Riesz transform, which is a unitary, shift-invariant operator and is obtained as a 2-D extension of the well known 1-D Hilbert transform operator. Existing methods for spectrogram demodulation rely on extension of sinusoidal demodulation method from the communications literature and require precise estimate of the 2-D carrier. On the other hand, the proposed method based on Riesz transform does not require a carrier estimate. The proposed method and the sinusoidal demodulation scheme are tested on real speech data. Experimental results show that the demodulated AM and carrier from Riesz demodulation represent the spectrogram patch more accurately compared with those obtained using the sinusoidal demodulation. The signal-to-reconstruction error ratio was found to be about 2 to 6 dB higher in case of the proposed demodulation approach.

Postcolonial futures: postcolonial literature and the Obama moment

In an analysis of President Obama's Acceptance Speech, this article argues that postcolonial theory is now being re-formulated for a global, transnational sensibility.

ASR emotional speech: Clarifying the issues and enhancing performance

There are multiple reasons to expect that recognising the verbal content of emotional speech will be a difficult problem, and recognition rates reported in the literature are in fact low. Including information about prosody improves recognition rate for emotions simulated by actors, but its relevance to the freer patterns of spontaneous speech is unproven. This paper shows that recognition rate for spontaneous emotionally coloured speech can be improved by using a language model based on increased representation of emotional utterances. The models are derived by adapting an already existing corpus, the British National Corpus (BNC). An emotional lexicon is used to identify emotionally coloured words, and sentences containing these words are recombined with the BNC to form a corpus with a raised proportion of emotional material. Using a language model based on that technique improves recognition rate by about 20%. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition under Noisy Audio-Video Conditions

This paper presents the maximum weighted stream posterior (MWSP) model as a robust and efficient stream integration method for audio-visual speech recognition in environments, where the audio or video streams may be subjected to unknown and time-varying corruption. A significant advantage of MWSP is that it does not require any specific measurements of the signal in either stream to calculate appropriate stream weights during recognition, and as such it is modality-independent. This also means that MWSP complements and can be used alongside many of the other approaches that have been proposed in the literature for this problem. For evaluation we used the large XM2VTS database for speaker-independent audio-visual speech recognition. The extensive tests include both clean and corrupted utterances with corruption added in either/both the video and audio streams using a variety of types (e.g., MPEG-4 video compression) and levels of noise. The experiments show that this approach gives excellent performance in comparison to another well-known dynamic stream weighting approach and also compared to any fixed-weighted integration approach in both clean conditions or when noise is added to either stream. Furthermore, our experiments show that the MWSP approach dynamically selects suitable integration weights on a frame-by-frame basis according to the level of noise in the streams and also according to the naturally fluctuating relative reliability of the modalities even in clean conditions. The MWSP approach is shown to maintain robust recognition performance in all tested conditions, while requiring no prior knowledge about the type or level of noise.

Campaign speech of W.D. Mayfield [for re-election as State Superintendent of Education]

This speech was given by Mr. Mayfield while running for re-election to the office of State Superintendent of Education. He gives evidence and reasons that he should be re-elected. He also talks about his future plans for if he does get re-elected.

Perceptual Evaluation of Video-Realistic Speech

abstract With many visual speech animation techniques now available, there is a clear need for systematic perceptual evaluation schemes. We describe here our scheme and its application to a new video-realistic (potentially indistinguishable from real recorded video) visual-speech animation system, called Mary 101. Two types of experiments were performed: a) distinguishing visually between real and synthetic image- sequences of the same utterances, ("Turing tests") and b) gauging visual speech recognition by comparing lip-reading performance of the real and synthetic image-sequences of the same utterances ("Intelligibility tests"). Subjects that were presented randomly with either real or synthetic image-sequences could not tell the synthetic from the real sequences above chance level. The same subjects when asked to lip-read the utterances from the same image-sequences recognized speech from real image-sequences significantly better than from synthetic ones. However, performance for both, real and synthetic, were at levels suggested in the literature on lip-reading. We conclude from the two experiments that the animation of Mary 101 is adequate for providing a percept of a talking head. However, additional effort is required to improve the animation for lip-reading purposes like rehabilitation and language learning. In addition, these two tasks could be considered as explicit and implicit perceptual discrimination tasks. In the explicit task (a), each stimulus is classified directly as a synthetic or real image-sequence by detecting a possible difference between the synthetic and the real image-sequences. The implicit perceptual discrimination task (b) consists of a comparison between visual recognition of speech of real and synthetic image-sequences. Our results suggest that implicit perceptual discrimination is a more sensitive method for discrimination between synthetic and real image-sequences than explicit perceptual discrimination.

Investigation and literature review of unilateral hearing loss

Literature and research were gathered and analyzed to determine the impact UHL has on a child’s education, speech and language development. The effects of early intervention and amplification were also analyzed.

Speech and the hearing-impaired child: evaluation and revision of the CID Speech Skills Worksheet

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the current use of the Central Institute for the Deaf’s Speech Skills Worksheet by teacher of the deaf and speech-language pathologists, review the current literature on speech development in hearing-impaired children, and apply the findings to develop a more comprehensive Speech Skills Worksheet.

An evaluation of private speech

This literature review examines the use of private speech among typically developing and hearing impaired children. This paper supports the view that private speech provides a self-regulatory function and guides behavior and problem-solving.

For better or worse: the effect of levodopa on speech in Parkinson's disease

While the beneficial effect of levodopa on traditional motor control tasks have been well documented over the decades. its effect on speech motor control has rarely been objectively examined and the existing literature remains inconclusive. This paper aims to examine the effect of levodopa on speech in patients with Parkinson's disease. It was hypothesized that levodopa would improve preparatory motor set related activity and alleviate hypophonia. Patients fasted and abstained from levodopa overnight. Motor examination and speech testing was performed the following day, pre-levodopa during their "off' state, then at hourly intervals post-medication to obtain the best "on" state. All speech stimuli showed a consistent tendency for increased loudness and faster rate during the "on" state, but this was accompanied by a greater extent of intensity decay. Pitch and articulation remained unchanged. Levodopa effectively upscaled the overall gain setting of vocal amplitude and tempo, similar to its well-known effect on limb movement. However, unlike limb movement, this effect on the final acoustic product of speech may or may not be advantageous, depending on the existing speech profile of individual patients. (C) 2007 Movement Disorder Society.

Interaction and Persuasion:An analysis of the use of rhetorical devices in Gordon Brown's speech to the Labour Party Conference, on September 25, 2006

This essay has identified and analysed rhetorical devices in Gordon Brown’s speech delivered at the Labour Party conference on September 25, 2006. The aim of the study was to identify specific rhetorical devices which are described as interactional resources, analyse their uses and discuss possible effects that they may have when included in a political speech. The results are based on my own interpretations but are supported by information provided in current literature by analysts and researchers of rhetoric use. The result findings could probably serve as evidence of the need for better understanding of the devices used by politicians in their relentless endeavours to influence audience decisions.

Poetry and public speech: three traces

Poetry is routinely seen as ‘marginal’ to public culture, especially in terms of it having lost its status as a form of public speech. Such a condition is often noted in nostalgic terms, in which a golden era—bardic or journalistic—is evoked to illustrate contemporary poetry’s lack. But traces of poetry’s instrumentality, especially as a form of public speech, can be found in various extra-poetic contexts.

In this article, three examples of poetry operating in ‘extra-poetic contexts’ will illustrate the different, sometimes troubling, ways in which traces of poetry as a mode of public speech can be observed in contemporary culture: the poem-cartoons of Michael Leunig; the role of the poet Les Murray in the drafting of a proposed preamble to the Constitution of Australia; and the quotation of William Ernest Henley’s ‘Invictus’ as the final statement of Timothy McVeigh (the ‘Ohio Bomber’) prior to his execution.

These examples illustrate that poetry-as-public-speech engages with political discourse in diverse, incommensurate ways. Leunig’s occasional cartoon-poems, appearing in the metropolitan press, are examples of poetry at its most public and politically engaged state. And yet, even Leunig’s most ‘political’ work gestures towards a realm beyond politics, where the poetic, the comic, and the existential coexist as a way of making life in the political realm more bearable. Les Murray’s role as a ‘national’ poet in the failed attempt to introduce a preamble to the Australian Constitution illustrates the vestigial role that poets can play in nation building. Lastly, McVeigh’s quotation of Henley, made without any explanation, shows the unpredictable and potentially volatile condition of poetry-as-public-speech. In addition, the examples variously engage in arguments about the relationship between the individual and the state, private identity and national history.

Literature as activism: interrogating the 21st century demise of the Arendtian political public sphere

This article explores Don DeLillo's literary activism through Arendtian perspectives to investigate what the demise of literature's relevance, specifically in a political context, may mean in the current era of an increasingly complex and conflicting 'web of human relationships'.  In that it is accepted that narrative has a particular ability to reveal insights as prelinguistic elements that are distinct from all we are able to access through our limited human perceptions, it remarks the Lacanian paradox that if being is in excess of language, then language is the medium by which this is accessed in the world. For DeLillo, writers may be under threat in a dynamic but destabilizing era, their art superceded by technology and fundamentalist terrorism, however, as suggested in Mao II, this renders the writer all the more necessary.  It is at the point at which the writer has nothing to say or is under duress to say noting, that a human crisis is reached. I ask, do current forms of political pressure to censure literature constitute a further diminishing of the Arendtian political public domain in which speech as action has primacy?