scholarly journals Neural specializations for speech and pitch: moving beyond the dichotomies

2007 ◽  
Vol 363 (1493) ◽  
pp. 1087-1104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J Zatorre ◽  
Jackson T Gandour
Keyword(s):  
Speech Processing ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Speech Sounds ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Afferent Pathways ◽  
Acoustical Properties ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Auditory Cortices ◽  
Processing Mechanisms

The idea that speech processing relies on unique, encapsulated, domain-specific mechanisms has been around for some time. Another well-known idea, often espoused as being in opposition to the first proposal, is that processing of speech sounds entails general-purpose neural mechanisms sensitive to the acoustic features that are present in speech. Here, we suggest that these dichotomous views need not be mutually exclusive. Specifically, there is now extensive evidence that spectral and temporal acoustical properties predict the relative specialization of right and left auditory cortices, and that this is a parsimonious way to account not only for the processing of speech sounds, but also for non-speech sounds such as musical tones. We also point out that there is equally compelling evidence that neural responses elicited by speech sounds can differ depending on more abstract, linguistically relevant properties of a stimulus (such as whether it forms part of one's language or not). Tonal languages provide a particularly valuable window to understand the interplay between these processes. The key to reconciling these phenomena probably lies in understanding the interactions between afferent pathways that carry stimulus information, with top-down processing mechanisms that modulate these processes. Although we are still far from the point of having a complete picture, we argue that moving forward will require us to abandon the dichotomy argument in favour of a more integrated approach.

Rate-Dependent Speech Processing Can be Domain Specific

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. Szostak ◽  
Mark A. Pitt ◽  
Laura C. Dilley
Keyword(s):  
Speech Processing ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Rate Dependent

Featural and Configural Processing of Faces and Houses in Matched Dyslexic and Typical Readers

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bahareh Jozranjbar ◽  
Arni Kristjansson ◽  
Heida Maria Sigurdardottir
Keyword(s):  
Object Recognition ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Reading Ability ◽  
Visual Recognition ◽  
Reading Deficits ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Configural Information ◽  
Lower House ◽  
Single Process ◽  
Processing Mechanisms

While dyslexia is typically described as a phonological deficit, recent evidence suggests that ventral stream regions, important for visual categorization and object recognition, are hypoactive in dyslexic readers who might accordingly show visual recognition deficits. By manipulating featural and configural information of faces and houses, we investigated whether dyslexic readers are disadvantaged at recognizing certain object classes or utilizing particular visual processing mechanisms. Dyslexic readers found it harder to recognize objects (houses), suggesting that visual problems in dyslexia are not completely domain-specific. Mean accuracy for faces was equivalent in the two groups, compatible with domain-specificity in face processing. While face recognition abilities correlated with reading ability, lower house accuracy was nonetheless related to reading difficulties even when accuracy for faces was kept constant, suggesting a specific relationship between visual word recognition and the recognition of non-face objects. Representational similarity analyses (RSA) revealed that featural and configural processes were clearly separable in typical readers, while dyslexic readers appeared to rely on a single process. This occurred for both faces and houses and was not restricted to particular visual categories. We speculate that reading deficits in some dyslexic readers reflect their reliance on a single process for object recognition.

scholarly journals Neural Responses to Ambiguity Involve Domain-general and Domain-specific Emotion Processing Systems

2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 547-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maital Neta ◽  
William M. Kelley ◽  
Paul J. Whalen
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Emotional Facial Expressions ◽  
Biologically Relevant ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Specific Emotion ◽  
On Line

Extant research has examined the process of decision making under uncertainty, specifically in situations of ambiguity. However, much of this work has been conducted in the context of semantic and low-level visual processing. An open question is whether ambiguity in social signals (e.g., emotional facial expressions) is processed similarly or whether a unique set of processors come on-line to resolve ambiguity in a social context. Our work has examined ambiguity using surprised facial expressions, as they have predicted both positive and negative outcomes in the past. Specifically, whereas some people tended to interpret surprise as negatively valenced, others tended toward a more positive interpretation. Here, we examined neural responses to social ambiguity using faces (surprise) and nonface emotional scenes (International Affective Picture System). Moreover, we examined whether these effects are specific to ambiguity resolution (i.e., judgments about the ambiguity) or whether similar effects would be demonstrated for incidental judgments (e.g., nonvalence judgments about ambiguously valenced stimuli). We found that a distinct task control (i.e., cingulo-opercular) network was more active when resolving ambiguity. We also found that activity in the ventral amygdala was greater to faces and scenes that were rated explicitly along the dimension of valence, consistent with findings that the ventral amygdala tracks valence. Taken together, there is a complex neural architecture that supports decision making in the presence of ambiguity: (a) a core set of cortical structures engaged for explicit ambiguity processing across stimulus boundaries and (b) other dedicated circuits for biologically relevant learning situations involving faces.

scholarly journals Evaluating Word Similarity Measure of Embeddings Through Binary Classification

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Aziz Altowayan ◽  
Lixin Tao
Keyword(s):  
Similarity Measure ◽  
Binary Classification ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Feature Representation ◽  
Entity Recognition ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Word Similarity ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Retrieval Rate

We consider the following problem: given neural language models (embeddings) each of which is trained on an unknown data set, how can we determine which model would provide a better result when used for feature representation in a downstream task such as text classification or entity recognition? In this paper, we assess the word similarity measure through analyzing its impact on word embeddings learned from various datasets and how they perform in a simple classification task. Word representations were learned and assessed under the same conditions. For training word vectors, we used the implementation of Continuous Bag of Words described in [1]. To assess the quality of the vectors, we applied the analogy questions test for word similarity described in the same paper. Further, to measure the retrieval rate of an embedding model, we introduced a new metric (Average Retrieval Error) which measures the percentage of missing words in the model. We observe that scoring a high accuracy of syntactic and semantic similarities between word pairs is not an indicator of better classification results. This observation can be justified by the fact that a domain-specific corpus contributes to the performance better than a general-purpose corpus. For reproducibility, we release our experiments scripts and results.

scholarly journals Domain-specific Evaluation Dataset Generator for Multilingual Text Analysis

2019 ◽  
pp. 140-147
Author(s):  
Emrah Inan ◽  
Vahab Mostafapour ◽  
Fatif Tekbacak
Keyword(s):  
Text Analysis ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Entity Linking ◽  
Named Entity ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Benchmark Datasets ◽  
Concise Information ◽  
Multilingual Text ◽  
The Given ◽  
Specific Evaluation

Web enables to retrieve concise information about specific entities including people, organizations, movies and their features. Additionally, large amount of Web resources generally lies on a unstructured form and it tackles to find critical information for specific entities. Text analysis approaches such as Named Entity Recognizer and Entity Linking aim to identify entities and link them to relevant entities in the given knowledge base. To evaluate these approaches, there are a vast amount of general purpose benchmark datasets. However, it is difficult to evaluate domain-specific approaches due to lack of evaluation datasets for specific domains. This study presents WeDGeM that is a multilingual evaluation set generator for specific domains exploiting Wikipedia category pages and DBpedia hierarchy. Also, Wikipedia disambiguation pages are used to adjust the ambiguity level of the generated texts. Based on this generated test data, a use case for well-known Entity Linking systems supporting Turkish texts are evaluated in the movie domain.

scholarly journals Bootstrap Domain-Specific Sentiment Classifiers from Unlabeled Corpora

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 269-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrius Mudinas ◽  
Dell Zhang ◽  
Mark Levene
Keyword(s):  
Supervised Learning ◽  
Learning Algorithms ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Sentiment Classification ◽  
Two Phase ◽  
Transductive Learning ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Sentiment Lexicon ◽  
Supervised Learning Algorithms

There is often the need to perform sentiment classification in a particular domain where no labeled document is available. Although we could make use of a general-purpose off-the-shelf sentiment classifier or a pre-built one for a different domain, the effectiveness would be inferior. In this paper, we explore the possibility of building domain-specific sentiment classifiers with unlabeled documents only. Our investigation indicates that in the word embeddings learned from the unlabeled corpus of a given domain, the distributed word representations (vectors) for opposite sentiments form distinct clusters, though those clusters are not transferable across domains. Exploiting such a clustering structure, we are able to utilize machine learning algorithms to induce a quality domain-specific sentiment lexicon from just a few typical sentiment words (“seeds”). An important finding is that simple linear model based supervised learning algorithms (such as linear SVM) can actually work better than more sophisticated semi-supervised/transductive learning algorithms which represent the state-of-the-art technique for sentiment lexicon induction. The induced lexicon could be applied directly in a lexicon-based method for sentiment classification, but a higher performance could be achieved through a two-phase bootstrapping method which uses the induced lexicon to assign positive/negative sentiment scores to unlabeled documents first, a nd t hen u ses those documents found to have clear sentiment signals as pseudo-labeled examples to train a document sentiment classifier v ia supervised learning algorithms (such as LSTM). On several benchmark datasets for document sentiment classification, our end-to-end pipelined approach which is overall unsupervised (except for a tiny set of seed words) outperforms existing unsupervised approaches and achieves an accuracy comparable to that of fully supervised approaches.

scholarly journals Dependability Modeling and Assessment in UML-Based Software Development

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Bernardi ◽  
José Merseguer ◽  
Dorina C. Petriu
Keyword(s):  
Software Development ◽  
Formal Model ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Software Modeling ◽  
Model Driven ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Software Model ◽  
Software Models ◽  
Assessment Approach ◽  
System Properties

Assessment of software nonfunctional properties (NFP) is an important problem in software development. In the context of model-driven development, an emerging approach for the analysis of different NFPs consists of the following steps: (a) to extend the software models with annotations describing the NFP of interest; (b) to transform automatically the annotated software model to the formalism chosen for NFP analysis; (c) to analyze the formal model using existing solvers; (d) to assess the software based on the results and give feedback to designers. Such a modeling→analysis→assessment approach can be applied to any software modeling language, be it general purpose or domain specific. In this paper, we focus on UML-based development and on the dependability NFP, which encompasses reliability, availability, safety, integrity, and maintainability. The paper presents the profile used to extend UML with dependability information, the model transformation to generate a DSPN formal model, and the assessment of the system properties based on the DSPN results.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document