Reasoning about sound similarities improves the performance of a Natural Language Understanding component that interprets speech recognizer output: we observed a 5% to 7% reduction in errors when we augmented the word strings with a phonetic representation, derived from the words by means of a dictionary. The best performance comes from mixture models incorporating both word and phone features....

This paper describes our progress in Cantonese spoken document retrieval. Over 60 hours of Cantonese television news broadcasts have been collected as part of AoE-IT Multimedia Repository. We have also developed the Multimedia Markup Language (MmML) for annotating the multimedia content in terms of anchor/field video frames and audio recordings. The audio tracks are indexed by a Cantonese sylla...

Most of the current voice conversion systems model the joint density of source and target features using a Gaussian mixture model. An inherent property of this approach is that the source and target features have to be properly aligned for the training. It is intuitively clear that the accuracy of the alignment has some effect on the conversion quality but this issue has not been thoroughly stu...

This paper studies various aspects of child vocalization as captured in a newly established parallel corpus of sixteen 18–31 months old US and Shanghainese toddlers. The recordings were acquired in 16-hour sessions during an ‘ordinary’ day in the child’s natural environment and manually labeled. The vocalization characteristics are studied by means of phonotactic and prosodic analysis with emph...

We observe a n -sample, the distribution of which is assumed to belong, or at least be close enough, given mixture model. propose an estimator this that belongs our model and possesses some robustness properties with respect possible misspecification it. establish non-asymptotic deviation bound for Hellinger distance between target its when consists densities belong VC-subgraph classes. Under s...

In this document we describe the Mixture EFA model estimated in Mplus. Four types of dependent variables are possible in this model: normally distributed, ordered categorical with logit or probit link, Poisson distributed with the exponential link function, and censored variables. Inflation is not available for the Censored and Poisson variables. Suppose that we estimate a K class model with M ...

In this paper we address the problem of topic classification of speech data. Our concern in this paper is the situation in which there is no speech or phoneme recognizer available for the domain of the speech data. In this situation the only inputs for training the system are audio speech files labeled according to the topics of interest. The process that we follow in developing the topic class...

I-vector based recognition is a well-established technique in state-of-the-art speaker and language recognition but its use in dialect and accent classification has received less attention. We represent an experimental study of i-vector based dialect classification, with a special focus on foreign accent detection from spoken Finnish. Using the CallFriend corpus, we first study how recognition ...

background & aim: esophageal cancer is one of the main common causes of death. the high prevalence of esophageal cancer in northern iran is an important public health problem. the main aim of this paper was to assess the factors affecting survival of  atients with esophageal cancer in neighbor provinces around the caspian sea using weibull mixture cure model and mixture cure model based on a no...

We present a new approach to quasi text-independent speaker verification based on pattern matching. Our method first seeks phonetically matched segments in two speech signals. For all aligned frame pairs of these segments we compute the probability that they were uttered by the same speaker. Based on these frame-level probabilities we take the decision whether the two signals were spoken by the...