In this paper, we present an integrated approach for recognizing both the word sequence and the syntactic-prosodic structure of a spontaneous utterance. The approach aims at improving the performance of the understanding component of speech understanding systems by exploiting not only acoustic and syntactic information, but also prosodic information directly within the speech recognition proces...

Tichu is a popular trick-taking climbing card game that involves strong strategic play along with elements of chance. Apart from the typical search-based methods that employ domain-dependent or domain-independent mechanisms for selecting the most promising action at each step of the game, the complex dynamics that arise from the team-play feature of Tichu suggests the use of agent-based techniq...

In this work automatic methods for determining the number of gaussians per state in a set of Hidden Markov Models are studied. Four different mix-up criteria are proposed to decide how to increase the size of the states. These criteria, derived from Maximum Likelihood scores, are focused to increase the discrimination between states obtaining different number of gaussians per state. We compare ...

This article presents the first results of our system applied to recognize automatically the handwritten dates on Brazilian bankchecks. Considering the omni-writer context, we detail here our recognition module dedicated to process the month field. This module is based on the combination of holistic and analytical approaches with a fixed lexicon. Both approaches operate with a single explicit s...

Consider a restricted channel whose constraints may be characterized by a jinite state machine model. Conventional coding techniques for such channels result in codes wh re the choice of a word to be transmitted is only a function of the current state and the information to be represented by this word. This paper develops techniques for constructing codes where the code word choice may also dep...

This demonstration is exhibiting an interactive tool for defining agent protocols using a new notation “HAPN” which we have developed to overcome issues we have experienced with commonly used agent protocol notations such as AUML. The notation has a formal semantics which facilitates back end support within the tool for checking desirable or undesirable properties of a specification. The notati...

This paper addresses the problem of speech recognition under accent variations in English language. It has been demonstrated in previous research efforts that the multi-transitional model architecture is one of the solutions for robust speech recognition. In this study, we describe an universal hybrid system that is trained with data from American, Australian, and British accented speech. Exper...

The process of human segmentation and labelling of speech can be seen as a two-step process. In the first step humans listen to a speech signal, recognize the word and phoneme sequence, and roughly determine the position of each phonetic boundary. In the second step humans examine several speech signal features (waveform, energy, spectrogram, etc.) to place a phonetic boundary time mark where t...

A synchronous observer is an adjunct to a system model that monitors its state variables and raises a signal flag when some condition is satisfied. Synchronous observers provide an alternative to temporal logic as a means to specify safety properties but have the advantage that they are expressed in the same notation as the system model— and thereby lower the mental hurdle to effective use of m...

The phonetic alignment of the spoken utterances for speech research are commonly performed by HMM-based speech recognizers, in forced alignment mode, but the training of the phonetic segment models requires considerable amounts of annotated data. When no such material is available, a possible solution is to synthesize the same phonetic sequence and align the resulting speech signal with the spo...