scholarly journals Punctuation Generation Inspired Linguistic Features for Mandarin Prosody Generation

Author(s):  
Chen-Yu Chiang ◽  
Yu-Ping Hung ◽  
Han-Yun Yeh ◽  
I-Bin Liao ◽  
Chen-Ming Pan

This paper proposes two fully-automatic machine-extracted linguistic features from an unlimited text input for Mandarin prosody generation. One is the punctuation confidence (PC) which measures the likelihood of inserting a major punctuation mark (PM) at a word boundary. Another is the quotation confidence (QC) which measures the likelihood of a word string to be quoted as a meaningful or emphasized unit in text. Because a major PM in a text is highly correlated with a prosodic break, and a quoted word string plays an important role in human language understanding, the two features potentially could provide useful information for prosody generation. The idea is first realized by employing conditional random field (CRF)-based models to predict major PMs, quoted word string locations, and their associated confidences, i.e., the PC and the QC, for each word boundary. Then, the predicted punctuations and their confidences are combined with traditional contextual linguistic features to predict prosodic-acoustic features. Both objective and subjective tests showed that the prosody generation with the proposed linguistic features performed better than the one without the proposed features. So, the proposed PC and QC are promising features for Mandarin prosody generation.

Author(s):  
Yosra Abdulaziz Mohammed

Cries of infants can be seen as an indicator of pain. It has been proven that crying caused by pain, hunger, fear, stress, etc., show different cry patterns. The work presented here introduces a comparative study between the performance of two different classification techniques implemented in an automatic classification system for identifying two types of infants' cries, pain, and non-pain. The techniques are namely, Continuous Hidden Markov Models (CHMM) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). Two different sets of acoustic features were extracted from the cry samples, those are MFCC and LPCC, the feature vectors generated by each were eventually fed into the classification module for the purpose of training and testing. The results of this work showed that the system based on CDHMM have better performance than that based on ANN. CDHMM gives the best identification rate at 96.1%, which is much higher than 79% of ANN whereby in general the system based on MFCC features performed better than the one that utilizes LPCC features.


2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit Antonides ◽  
Sophia R. Wunderink

Summary: Different shapes of individual subjective discount functions were compared using real measures of willingness to accept future monetary outcomes in an experiment. The two-parameter hyperbolic discount function described the data better than three alternative one-parameter discount functions. However, the hyperbolic discount functions did not explain the common difference effect better than the classical discount function. Discount functions were also estimated from survey data of Dutch households who reported their willingness to postpone positive and negative amounts. Future positive amounts were discounted more than future negative amounts and smaller amounts were discounted more than larger amounts. Furthermore, younger people discounted more than older people. Finally, discount functions were used in explaining consumers' willingness to pay for an energy-saving durable good. In this case, the two-parameter discount model could not be estimated and the one-parameter models did not differ significantly in explaining the data.


2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Passini

The relation between authoritarianism and social dominance orientation was analyzed, with authoritarianism measured using a three-dimensional scale. The implicit multidimensional structure (authoritarian submission, conventionalism, authoritarian aggression) of Altemeyer’s (1981, 1988) conceptualization of authoritarianism is inconsistent with its one-dimensional methodological operationalization. The dimensionality of authoritarianism was investigated using confirmatory factor analysis in a sample of 713 university students. As hypothesized, the three-factor model fit the data significantly better than the one-factor model. Regression analyses revealed that only authoritarian aggression was related to social dominance orientation. That is, only intolerance of deviance was related to high social dominance, whereas submissiveness was not.


Author(s):  
J. E. Smyth

During the early 1940s, journalists observed that after years of men controlling women’s fashion, Hollywood had become “a fashion center in which women designers are getting to be a big power.” In a town where “the working girl is queen,” it was women who really knew how to dress working women. Edith Head’s name dominates Hollywood costume design. Though a relatively poor sketch artist who refused to sew in public, Head understood what the average woman wanted to wear and knew better than anyone how to craft her image as the-one-and-only Edith Head. However, she was one of many women who designed Hollywood glamour in the studio era. This chapter juxtaposes Head’s career with that of a younger, fiercely independent designer who would quickly upstage Head as a creative force. In many senses, Dorothy Jeakins’s postwar career ascent indicated the waning of the Hollywood system and the powerful relationship between female designers, stars, and fans.


2000 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tricia S. Clement ◽  
Thomas R. Zentall

We tested the hypothesis that pigeons could use a cognitively efficient coding strategy by training them on a conditional discrimination (delayed symbolic matching) in which one alternative was correct following the presentation of one sample (one-to-one), whereas the other alternative was correct following the presentation of any one of four other samples (many-to-one). When retention intervals of different durations were inserted between the offset of the sample and the onset of the choice stimuli, divergent retention functions were found. With increasing retention interval, matching accuracy on trials involving any of the many-to-one samples was increasingly better than matching accuracy on trials involving the one-to-one sample. Furthermore, following this test, pigeons treated a novel sample as if it had been one of the many-to-one samples. The data suggest that rather than learning each of the five sample-comparison associations independently, the pigeons developed a cognitively efficient single-code/default coding strategy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 5646
Author(s):  
Cheng-Wei Hung ◽  
Ying-Kuan Tsai ◽  
Tai-An Chen ◽  
Hsin-Hung Lai ◽  
Pin-Wen Wu

This study used experimental and numerical simulation methods to discuss the attenuation mechanism of a blast inside a tunnel for different forms of a tunnel pressure reduction module under the condition of a tunnel near-field explosion. In terms of the experiment, a small-scale model was used for the explosion experiments of a tunnel pressure reduction module (expansion chamber, one-pressure relief orifice plate, double-pressure relief orifice plate). In the numerical simulation, the pressure transfer effect was evaluated using the ALE fluid–solid coupling and mapping technique. The findings showed that the pressure attenuation model changed the tunnel section to diffuse, reduce, or detour the pressure transfer, indicating the blast attenuation effect. In terms of the effect of blast attenuation, the double-pressure relief orifice plate was better than the one-pressure relief orifice plate, and the single-pressure relief orifice plate was better than the expansion chamber. The expansion chamber attenuated the blast by 30%, the one-pressure relief orifice plate attenuated the blast by 51%, and the double-pressure relief orifice plate attenuated the blast by 82%. The blast attenuation trend of the numerical simulation result generally matched that of the experimental result. The results of this study can provide a reference for future protective designs and reinforce the U.S. Force regulations.


1985 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 592-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. C. Collins ◽  
J. H. Newman ◽  
N. E. Wickersham ◽  
W. K. Vaughn ◽  
J. R. Snapper ◽  
...  

Our purpose was to see if the postmortem weight ratio of extravascular lung water to blood-free dry lung (blood-free ratio) was related to similar ratios in blood-inclusive lung and in blood. We developed linear regressions of blood-free ratio on ratios for blood-inclusive lung and blood together and for blood-inclusive lung alone for 73 sheep studied under 11 different protocols and for two subgroups of sheep, one with plasma space expansion and the other without expansion. The relation of ratios of blood-free to blood-inclusive lungs was different between the two subgroups. Although all regressions were highly correlated, the fits of the blood-free ratio on ratios for blood-inclusive lung and blood together were better than for blood-inclusive lung alone. The mean error of prediction of extravascular lung water for all sheep was significantly less for the regression of blood-free ratio on ratios for blood and blood-inclusive lung together (11 g) than for blood-inclusive lung alone (18 g). This study shows that weights of lung homogenate and blood samples before and after simple oven drying can be used to provide accurate inexpensive estimates of postmortem extravascular lung water.


Energies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 2500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo Hernández-Márquez ◽  
Carlos Avila-Rea ◽  
José García-Sánchez ◽  
Ramón Silva-Ortigoza ◽  
Gilberto Silva-Ortigoza ◽  
...  

This paper has two aims. The first is to develop a robust hierarchical tracking controller for the DC/DC Buck-Boost–inverter–DC motor system. This controller considers a high level control for the inverter–DC motor subsystems and a low level control for the DC/DC Buck-Boost converter subsystem. Such controls solve the tracking task associated with the angular velocity of the motor shaft and the output voltage of the converter, respectively, via the differential flatness approach. The second aim is to present a comparison of the robust hierarchical controller to a passive controller. This, with the purpose of showing that performance achieved with the hierarchical controller proposed in this paper, is better than the one achieved with the passive controller. Both controllers are experimentally implemented on a prototype of the DC/DC Buck-Boost–inverter–DC motor system by using Matlab-Simulink along with the DS1104 board from dSPACE. According to experimental results, the proposal in the present paper achieves a better performance than the passive controller.


2012 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 833-850 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ziqi Yan ◽  
Lars Gottschalk ◽  
Irina Krasovskaia ◽  
Jun Xia

The long-term mean value of runoff is the basic descriptor of available water resources. This paper focuses on the accuracy that can be achieved when mapping this variable across space and along main rivers for a given stream gauging network. Three stochastic interpolation schemes for estimating average annual runoff across space are evaluated and compared. Two of the schemes firstly interpolate runoff to a regular grid net and then integrate the grid values along rivers. One of these schemes includes a constraint to account for the lateral water balance along the rivers. The third scheme interpolates runoff directly to points along rivers. A drainage basin in China with 20 gauging sites is used as a test area. In general, all three approaches reproduce the sample discharges along rivers with postdiction errors along main river branches around 10%. Using more objective cross-validation results, it was found that the two schemes based on basin integration, and especially the one with a constraint, performed significantly better than the one with direct interpolation to points along rivers. The analysis did not allow identification of possible influence of surface water use.


2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andriy Bodnaruk ◽  
Tim Loughran ◽  
Bill McDonald

AbstractMeasuring the extent to which a firm is financially constrained is critical in assessing capital structure. Extant measures of financial constraints focus on macro firm characteristics such as age and size, variables highly correlated with other firm attributes. We parse 10-K disclosures filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) using a unique lexicon based on constraining words. We find that the frequency of constraining words exhibits very low correlation with traditional measures of financial constraints and predicts subsequent liquidity events, such as dividend omissions or increases, equity recycling, and underfunded pensions, better than widely used financial constraint indexes.


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