Pause for reflection

Pause for reflection

Why such relentless phreneticism? Why, when the media consider a piece of science to be of public interest, do they invariably splash it as news for immediate consumption? Why so little insight, so few reflective or truly helpful feature articles after a pause for thought? One answer is that, along with novelty, we all need topicality (real or apparent) to attract our attention to a news story....

Foundation Evaluation Startup: A Pause for Reflection

Two transcription pause elements underlie a σ70-dependent pause cycle.

The movement of RNA polymerase (RNAP) during transcription elongation is modulated by DNA-encoded elements that cause the elongation complex to pause. One of the best-characterized pause sequences is a binding site for the σ(70) initiation factor that induces pausing at a site near lambdoid phage late-gene promoters. An essential component of this σ(70)-dependent pause is the elemental pause si...

Pause Prediction from Text for Speech Synthesis with User-Definable Pause Insertion Likelihood Threshold

Predicting the location of pauses from text is an important aspect for speech synthesizers. The accuracy of pause prediction can significantly influence both naturalness and intelligibility. Pauses which help listeners to better parse the synthesized speech into meaningful units are deemed to increase naturalness and intelligibility ratings, while pauses in unexpected or incorrect locations can...

Filled-pause Modeling for Medical Transcriptions

We present our recent progress in filled pause (FP) modeling for a highly spontaneous medical transcription task. Our studies confirm that FP modeling is an important topic for spontaneous speech applications, which must be explicitly addressed in acoustic, lexical, and language modeling. We provide a framework for datadriven lexical modeling of FP acoustic variability with respect to phonemic ...