Recent studies have shown that concepts of effective field theory such as naturalness can be profitably applied to relativistic mean-field models of nuclei. Here the analysis by Friar, Madland, and Lynn of naturalness in a relativistic point-coupling model is extended. Fits to experimental nuclear data support naive dimensional analysis as a useful principle and imply a mean-field expansion ana...

We describe an approach to improving the naturalness of a social dialogue system, Talkie, by adding disfluencies and other content-independent enhancements to synthesized conversations. We investigated whether listeners perceive conversations with these improvements as natural (i.e., human-like) as human-human conversations. We also assessed their ability to correctly identify these conversatio...

The quality of ontologies (QoO) is increasingly becoming a research issue on the Semantic Web. Ontology users may have difficulties locating the proper concepts in large ontologies, due to low quality. To quantify these problems, we use the notion of naturalness. In this paper we evaluate several existing important ontologies (WordNet, UMLS, etc.) to get numeric measures of naturalness. We conc...

ln this paper we present an strategy to improve the naturalness of a text to speech system for Spanish based on the development of a new pitch generator. The new model worKs with text previously parsed with an heuristic breath group parser. The results show that the new pitch generator is pre'ferred by listeners compared to our previous model. lt is also shown that errors of the heuristic parse...

We study the problem of evaluating super resolution methods. Traditional evaluation methods usually judge the quality of super resolved images based on a single measure of their difference with the original high resolution images. In this paper, we proposed to use both fidelity (the difference with original images) and naturalness (human visual perception of super resolved images) for evaluatio...

The argument from naturalness is widely employed in contemporary quantum field theory. Essentially a formalized aesthetic criterion, it received a meaning in the debate on the Higgs mechanism, which goes beyond aesthetics. We follow the history of technical definitions of fine tuning at the scale of electroweak symmetry breaking. It is argued that they give rise to a special interpretation of p...

This study attempts to investigate the change of naturalness impression for the Japanese utterance by Japanese as foreign language learners (JFL) before and after pronunciation training (shadowing / repeating), and to discuss the crucial prosodic cue for the naturalness judgment. The speech of 8 JFL learners before and after pronunciation training was used, and their durational pattern, pitch p...

ABSTRACT In segment selection for concatenative Text-to-Speech (TTS), it is important to utilize a cost that corresponds to the perceptual characteristics. We clarify correspondence to the perceptual scores of the cost, and then various functions to integrate the costs are evaluated. The perceptual scores are determined from results of perceptual experiments on the naturalness of synthetic spee...

Virtual humans are employed in many interactive applications, including (serious) games. Their motion should be natural and allow interaction with its surroundings and other (virtual) humans in real time. Physical controllers offer physical realism and (physical) interaction with the environment. Because they typically act on a selected set of joints, it is hard to evaluate their naturalness in...

Most humans now live in cities and their main experience of nature is through urban greenery. An increasing number of studies show the importance of urban green spaces for well-being, although most of them are based on visual perception. A questionnaire examining people's evaluations of natural sounds was answered by 1326 individuals living near one of six urban green areas of varying naturalne...