The frequency and duration of microbial contamination events in the environment in which ready-to-eat (RTE) foods are exposed for processing and packaging is subject to uncertainty and variability. Variability, within-model parameter uncertainty, and uncertainty regarding model selection are formally considered in modeling the frequency and duration of such contamination events by Listeria spec...

Referring expressions are thought to be tailored to the needs of the listener, even when those needs might be very costly to assess, but tests of this claim seldom manipulate listener’s and speaker’s knowledge independently. The Map Task enables us to do so. We examine two ‘tailoring’ changes in repeated mentions of landmark names: falling clarity of word articulation and rising accessibility o...

High frequency financial data is irregularly spaced in time. The information content that determines the time between subsequent trades introduces is potentially related to volatility. We introduce a new continuous time model to jointly model stock return and duration between trades. This model include a bivariate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process for two latent processes: log-volatility of stock retu...

We present in this paper the results of a duration study and a tonal coarticulation study designed for the concatenative Mandarin Chinese synthesis system developed at the Dresden University of Technology. It is reported that the duration model and the tonal coarticulation model are the two most important components of the prosody control in Mandarin. The material for the study of the two proso...

The first part of the work detailed in this paper, analyzes the probability distribution of vowels in Malayalam, an Indian language. Different probability distributions are fitted to the duration values of each vowel and the best fit is determined using quantile-quantile plot. The probability distribution of duration values, in accordance with the different factors affecting durations are also ...

We propose a method to improve speaker recognition lexical model performance using acoustic-prosodic information. More specifically, the lexical model is trained using durationand pronunciation-conditioned word N-grams, simultaneously modeling lexical information along with their acoustic and prosodic characteristics. Support vector machines are used for modeling and scoring, with N-gram freque...

This article describes our method to model the sound duration of standard Arabic speech. The final aim is the prosodic generation for an Arabic Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis system. Several authors have already identified on isolated word corpora the effects of speakers, word structure, sound nature and Arabic dialects. In our work hypothesis is to verify these effects for standard Arabic on c...

In this paper, the occupancy of the HMM states is modeled by means of a Markov chain. A linear estimator is introduced to compute the probabilities of the Markov chain. The distribution functions (DF) represents accurately the observed data. Representing the DF as a Markov chain allows the use of standard HMM recognizers. The increase of complexity is negligible in training and strongly limited...

In this paper we show that accurate HMMs for connected word recognition can be obtained without context dependent modeling and discriminative training. To account for di erent speaking rates, we de ne two HMMs for each word that must be trained. The two models have the same, standard, left to right topology with the possibility of skipping one state, but each model has a di erent number of stat...