BACKGROUND During the wave 1 of the influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 virus, Norway appeared to be suffering from high mortality rates. However, by the end of the pandemic, it was widely reported that the number of deaths were much lower than previous years. OBJECTIVES The mortality burden from influenza is often assessed by two different approaches: counting influenza-certified deaths and estimating th...

In this paper, we study methods to enhance the precision of the online estimation process of a recently proposed approach, ensemble speaker and speaking environment modeling (ESSEM), and therefore improve its overall performance. The ESSEM approach consists of two integral phases, offline and online. In the offline phase, an ensemble environment configuration is prepared by a large collection o...

We present a study of data simulated using acoustic models trained on Switchboard data, and then recognized using various Switchboard-trained acoustic models. When we recognize real Switchboard conversations, simple development models give a word error rate (WER) of about 47 percent. If instead we simulate the speech data using word transcriptions of the conversation, obtaining the pronunciatio...

Influenced by Bower (Am. Psychol. 36, 129-148, 1981) and Lang (Anxiety and the Anxiety Disorders, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, N.J., 1985), we tested three hypotheses concerning anxious mood and memory: (1) the mood state dependent hypothesis which states that memory retrieval will be greater when mood at encoding and at recall are the same than when they are different: (2) the encoding mood congruent h...

Sequence recognition performance is often summarised first in terms of the number of hits (H), substitutions (S), deletions (D) and insertions (I), and then as a single statistic by the “word error rate” WER = 100(S+D+I)/(H+S+D). While in common use, WER has two disadvantages as a performance measure. One is that it has no upper bound, so it doesn’t tell you how good a system is, only that one ...

Discussions beginning in 2012 ultimately led to a landmark document from the World Health Organization (WHO) titled, Control and Elimination of Plasmodium vivax: A Technical Brief, published in July 2015. That body of work represents multiple expert consultations coordinated by the WHO Global Malaria Program, along with technical consensus gathering from national malaria control programs via th...

This paper presents a new kmd of language models: caregor@vord varigrums. This special model type permits a tight integration of word-based and category-based modeling of word sequences. Any succession of words and word categones may be employed to descnbe a given word history. This provides a much greater flexibtlity than previous combinations of word-based and category-based language models. ...

We examined the content of 2 talk-show TV programs in order to better understand the challenges posed by this program genre to automatic transcription. Six talk-show episodes were first segmented, transcribed and annotated by experts. Most of the speech content was found in conversational style with a significant portion of overlapped speech, about 18%. Then, automatic speech recognition experi...

During 2000 and 2001 two large data collections were performed, with paid users. We analyze the effects of speech recognition accuracy, as measured by Word Error Rate (WER), on other metrics. Analysis shows a linear correlation between WER and the Task Completion metrics, and (unexpectedly) this relationship remains more or less linear even for quite high values of WER. The picture for User Sat...

In recent work, we proposed the rational all-pass transform (RAPT) as the basis of a speaker adaptation scheme intended for use with a large vocabulary speech recognition system. It was shown that RAPT-based adaptation reduces to a linear transformation of cepstral means, much like the better known maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR). In a set of speech recognition experiments conducted...