Computer Go has been a new unconquered challenge to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Intelligence (CI) societies since 1997 when Garry Kasparov, the human Chess champion, was defeated by the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. Computer Go is not only an unsolved problem by itself, but also serves as an excellent test bed for a novel technique to apply it to a practical problem since ...

We present our Mandarin BN/BC transcription system recently developed for the GALE07 evaluation. The system employs a 3-pass decoding strategy trained with over 1300 hours of quickly transcribed audio. We successfully apply discriminative training, dynamic unsupervised language model adaptation, and system combination techniques in our system. We furthermore achieve improvements by combining an...

Tone has a crucial role in Mandarin speech in distinguishing ambiguous words. Most state-of-the-art Mandarin automatic speech recognition systems adopt embedded tone modeling, where tonal acoustic units are used and F0 features are appended to the spectral feature vector. In this paper, we combine the embedded aproach (using improved F0 smoothing) with explicit tone modeling in rescoring the ou...

MLP based front-ends have shown significant complementary properties to conventional spectral features. As part of the DARPA GALE program, different MLP features were developed for Mandarin ASR. In this paper, all the proposed frontends are compared in systematic manner and we extensively investigate the scalability of these features in terms of the amount of training data (from 100 hours to 16...

Conventional mispronunciation detection systems that have the capability of providing corrective feedback typically require a set of common error patterns that are known beforehand, obtained either by consulting with experts, or from a humanannotated nonnative corpus. In this paper, we propose a mispronunciation detection framework that does not rely on nonnative training data. We first discove...

The intonation model is an important component in text-tospeech systems to obtain natural and expressive speech synthesis. In this paper we propose a superpositional model for Mandarin Chinese. The intonation model is composed of the syllable and the phrase component. The parameters of the model are estimated using JEMA, a training approach with many advantages related to robustness and precisi...

An innovative method for speech recognition of tone languages is reported. By definition, the tone of a syllable is determined by the pitch contour of the entire syllable. We propose that the pitch information on the main vowel of a syllable is sufficient to determine the tone of that syllable. Therefore, to recognize tone languages, only main vowels are needed to associate with tones. The numb...

Environmental policy discussions in the United States have been characterized by a constant tug-ofwar among an “unholy alliance of ignorance, ideology, and self-interest” since the early 1970s (see Blinder (1987) and Rolston (2000) for representative discussions of the roles scientists have played). Scientists are challenged in this tug-of-war when asked to interpret the social and biophysical ...

We explore the integration of multiple factors such as genre and speaker gender for acoustic model adaptation tasks to improve Mandarin ASR system performance on broadcast news and broadcast conversation audio. We investigate the use of multifactor clustering of acoustic model training data and the application of MPE-MAP and fMPE-MAP acoustic model adaptations. We found that by effectively comb...

In this paper, the acoustic characteristics and recognition of whispered speech are discussed. A Mandarin digits database is built both in normal speech and whispered speech. The collected speech materials of normal and whispered speech are analyzed to verify the characteristics and differences for the two kinds of speech. Cross recognition is carried out using normal and whispered speech as tr...