How does language influence the emotions and actions of large audiences? Functionally, emotions help address environmental uncertainty by constraining the body to support adaptive responses and social coordination. We propose emotions provide a similar function in language processing by constraining the mental simulation of language content to facilitate comprehension, and to foster alignment o...

We present a database of parliamentary debates that contains the complete record of parliamentary speeches from Dáil Éireann, the lower house and principal chamber of the Irish parliament, from 1919 to 2013. In addition, the database contains background information on all TDs (Teachta Dála, members of parliament), such as their party affiliations, constituencies and office positions. The curren...

Clean speech data is necessary for spoken language processing, however, there is no public Japanese dialect corpus collected for speech processing. Parallel speech corpora of dialect are also important because real dialect affects each other, however, the existing data only includes noisy speech data of dialects and their translation in common language. In this paper, we collected parallel spee...

This paper reports effects of increasing modalities in understanding three simultaneous speeches with two microphones. This problem is difficult because the beamforming technique adopted for a microphone array needs at least four microphones, and because independent component analysis adopted for blind source separation needs at least three microphones. We investigate four cases; monaural (one ...

Speaker segmentation is an important task in multi-party conversations. Overlapping speech poses a serious problem in segmenting audio into speaker turns. We propose an audio-visual speech separation system consisting of an array microphone with eight sensors and an omnidirectional color camera. Multiple concurrent speeches are segmented by fusing the two heterogeneous sensors. Each segmented s...

Legislative speech records from the 101st to 108th Congresses of the US Senate are analysed to study political ideologies. A widely-used text classification algorithm – Support Vector Machines (SVM) – allows the extraction of terms that are most indicative of conservative and liberal positions in legislative speeches and the prediction of senators’ ideological positions, with a 92 per cent leve...

Statistical word alignment often suffers from data sparseness. Part-of-speeches are often incorporated in NLP tasks to reduce data sparseness. In this paper, we attempt to mitigate such problem by reflecting alignment tendency between part-of-speeches to statistical word alignment. Because our approach does not rely on any language-dependent knowledge, it is very simple and purely statistic to ...

For years speech translation has focused on the recognition and translation of discourses in limited domains, such as hotel reservations or scheduling tasks. Only recently research projects have been started to tackle the problem of open domain speech recognition and translation of complex tasks such as lectures and speeches. In this paper we present the on-going work at our laboratory in open ...