The Parametric Go/No-Go (PGNG) test assesses cognitive domains including attention and executive functioning with three levels of increasing difficulty. Level 1 measures accuracy and response time to three targets. Level 2 adds a nonrepeating rule, measuring response time to two targets, accuracy for targets, and accuracy for appropriate inhibition. Level 3 has three targets with the same nonre...

Language models (LMs) are often constructed by building multiple component LMs that are combined using interpolation weights. By tuning these interpolation weights, using either perplexity or discriminative approaches, it is possible to adapt LMs to a particular task. In this work, improved LM adaptation is achieved by introducing context dependent interpolation weights. An important part of th...

In this correspondence, a set of new approaches is proposed to model the Mandarin syllables for accurate recognition with limited training data while specially considering the effect of tones, including improved initial values and state transition topologies, and making use of the durational cue. The results show that these approaches are very useful practically.

We describe the recent progress in SRI’s Mandarin speech-totext system developed for 2008 evaluation in the DARPAGALE program. A data-driven lexicon expansion technique and language model adaptation methods contribute to the improvement in recognition performance. Our system yields 8.3% character error rate on the GALE dev08 test set, and 7.5% after combining with RWTH systems. Compared to our ...

The scarcity of large-scale non-native corpora and human annotations are two fundamental challenges in the development of computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) systems. We explored several transfer learning based methods to detect the pronunciation errors without using nonnative training data. Effects were confirmed in the Mandarin Chinese pronunciation error detection of Japanese spe...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to explore changes in mobility in terms of ambulation and transfer over 1 year in patients with early-onset Alzheimer's disease (EOAD), and to compare mobility in EOAD with patients with other types of early-onset dementia (EOOD). METHOD Forty-two patients with EOAD and 30 patients with EOOD were included. All patients were home-dwelling and had mild or mo...

We have developed a four-language automatic language identification system for high-quality speech. The system uses a neural network-based segmentation algorithm to segment speech into seven broad phonetic categories. Phonetic and prosodic features computed on these categories are then input to a second network that performs the language classification. The system was trained and tested on sepa...

In this paper, tone nucleus model is employed to represent and convert F0 contour for synthesizing an emotional Mandarin speech from a neutral speech. Compared with previous prosody transforming methods, the proposed method 1) only converts the tone nucleus part of each syllable rather than the whole F0 contour to avoid the data sparseness problems; 2) builds mapping functions for well-chosen t...

Intelligibility assessment is one of the important aspects in the text-to-speech system (TTS) evaluation. Several intelligibility assessment methods have been proposed and successfully applied to European languages, both at word level and sentence level. Since Mandarin has its own unique features, these methods must be modified when applying to Mandarin. The word level assessment methods such a...

This paper describes the technical and system building advances in the automatic transcription of Mandarin broadcast speech made at IBM in the first year of the DARPA GALE program. In particular, we discuss the application of minimum phone error (MPE) discriminative training and a new topicadaptive language modeling technique. We present results on both the RT04 evaluation data and two larger c...