Abstract

—Automatic phrase boundary detection could be useful in applications, including computer-assisted pronunciation tutoring, spoken language understanding, and automatic speech recognition. In this work, we consider the problem of phrase boundary detection on English utterances spoken by native American speakers. Most of the existing works on boundary detection use either knowledge-based features or representations learnt from a convolutional neural network (CNN) based architecture, considering word segments. However, we hypothesize that combining knowledge-based features and learned representations could improve the boundary detection task’s performance. For this, we consider a fusion-based model considering deep neural network (DNN) and CNN, where CNNs are used for learning representations and DNN is used to combine knowledge-based features and learned representations. Further, unlike existing data-driven methods, we consider two CNNs for learning representation, one for word segments and another for word-final syllable segments. Experiments on Boston University radio news and Switchboard corpora show the benefit of the proposed fusionbased approach compared to a baseline using knowledge-based features only and another baseline using feature representations from CNN only. Index Terms—Boundary detection, human-computer interaction, computer-assisted pronunciation tutoring, CNN based representation learning

Abstract

Recently, there is an increasing interest in multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) where a speech recognition system caters to multiple low resource languages by taking advantage of low amounts of labelled corpora in multiple languages. With multilingualism becoming common in today’s world, there has been increasing interest in code-switching ASR as well. In code-switching, multiple languages are freely interchanged within a single sentence or between sentences. The success of low-resource multilingual and code-switching (MUCS) ASR often depends on the variety of languages in terms of their acoustics, linguistic characteristics as well as the amount of data available and how these are carefully considered in building the ASR system. In this MUCS 2021 challenge, we would like to focus on building MUCS ASR systems through two different subtasks related to a total of seven Indian languages, namely Hindi, Marathi, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati and Bengali. For this purpose, we provide a total of ∼600 hours of transcribed speech data, comprising train and test sets, in these languages, including two code-switched language pairs, Hindi-English and Bengali-English. We also provide baseline recipes1 for both the subtasks with 30.73% and 32.45% word error rate on the MUCS test sets, respectively. Index Terms: Multilingual, Code-switching, low-resource

Abstract

In this study, listeners of varied Indian nativities are asked to listen and recognize TIMIT utterances spoken by American speakers. We have three kinds of responses from each listener while they recognize an utterance: 1. Sentence difficulty ratings, 2. Speaker difficulty ratings, and 3. Transcription of the utterance. From these transcriptions, word error rate (WER) is calculated and used as a metric to evaluate the similarity between the recognized and the original sentences. The sentences selected in this study are categorized into three groups: Easy, Medium and Hard, based on the frequency of occurrence of the words in them. We observe that the sentence, speaker difficulty ratings and the WERs increase from easy to hard categories of sentences. We also compare the human speech recognition performance with that using three automatic speech recognition (ASR) under following three combinations of acoustic model (AM) and language model (LM): ASR1) AM trained with recordings from speakers of Indian origin and LM built on TIMIT text, ASR2) AM using recordings from native American speakers and LM built on text from LIBRI speech corpus, and ASR3) AM using recordings from native American speakers and LM build on LIBRI speech and TIMIT text. We observe that HSR performance is similar to that of ASR1 whereas ASR3 achieves the best performance. Speaker nativity wise analysis shows that utterances from speakers of some nativity are more difficult to recognize by Indian listeners compared to few other nativities. Index Terms: human speech recognition, automatic speech recognition

Abstract

Research and fabrication of micro devices hold the key to low power devices, sensors and lab-on-a-chip systems which are in much need today for diagnosis, IOT etc. Cost of setting up a fabrication laboratory and conducting photolithography is high due to need of expensive equipment. We present a design of low-cost UV exposure system which can be used for both high resolution and low resolution photolithography. In first part, we present the study of irradiance distribution patterns of different UV LED arrangements. We use uniformity as a criterion for selecting the arrangement that gives the best illumination uniformity in largest area. The maximum, minimum and average exposure energy and uniformity have been presented. Using these results, we present an optimal system design for UV photolithography. The novelty of our work is simulating the UV exposure system for different parameters for making an optimal choice for a versatile system (high energy & low energy), different uniformity for different resolution to save power and have better control.

Abstract

A TeV scale leptoquark (LQ) is one of the promising explanations of the recent anomalies in the semileptonic decays of 퐵 mesons. Among the various LQs, the vector U1 is capable of explaining the anomalies in both 푅퐷(∗) and 푅퐾 (∗) observables. We use the current LHC data to put bounds on the parameter space of U1 relevant for the anomalies. Precise bounds are drawn by recasting the latest 휏휏 and 휇휇 searches by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations. We find that it is imperative to include the resonant production modes for obtaining limits in the low mass regions. For higher mass points, the non-resonant production modes play a dominant role.

Abstract

One of the major challenges in the health care sector is that approximately 80% of generated data remains unstructured and unused. Since it is difficult to handle unstructured data from electronic medical record systems, it tends to be neglected for analyses in most hospitals and medical centers. Therefore, there is a need to analyze unstructured big data in health care systems so that we can optimally utilize and unearth all unexploited information from it. Objective: In this study, we aimed to extract a list of diseases and associated keywords along with the corresponding time durations from an indigenously developed electronic medical record system and describe the possibility of analytics from the acquired datasets. Methods: We propose a novel, finite-state machine to sequentially detect and cluster disease names from patients’ medical history. We defined 3 states in the finite-state machine and transition matrix, which depend on the identified keyword. In addition, we also defined a state-change action matrix, which is essentially an action associated with each transition. The dataset used in this study was obtained from an indigenously developed electronic medical record system called eyeSmart that was implemented across a large, multitier ophthalmology network in India. The dataset included patients’past medical history and contained records of 10,000 distinct patients. Results: We extracted disease names and associated keywords by using the finite-state machine with an accuracy of 95%, sensitivity of 94.9%, and positive predictive value of 100%. For the extraction of the duration of disease, the machine’s accuracy was 93%, sensitivity was 92.9%, and the positive predictive value was 100%. Conclusions: We demonstrated that the finite-state machine we developed in this study can be used to accurately identify disease names, associated keywords,

Abstract

Witness testimonies are important constituents of a court case description and play a significant role in the final decision. We propose two techniques to identify sentences representing witness testimonies. The first technique employs linguistic rules whereas the second technique applies distant supervision where training set is constructed automatically using the output of the first technique. We then represent the identified witness testimonies in a more meaningful structure – event verb (predicate) along with its arguments corresponding to semantic roles A0 and A1 [1]. We demonstrate effectiveness of such representation in retrieving semantically similar prior relevant cases. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to apply NLP techniques to extract witness information from court judgements and use it for retrieving prior court cases.

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of Apertium, a free and open-source rule-based machine translation platform. Translation in Apertium happens through a pipeline of modular tools, and the platform continues to be improved as more language pairs are added. Several advances have been implemented since the last publication, including some new optional modules: a module that allows rules to process recursive structures at the structural transfer stage, a module that deals with contiguous and discontiguous multi-word expressions, and a module that resolves anaphora to aid translation. Also highlighted is the hybridisation of Apertium through statistical modules that augment the pipeline, and statistical methods that augment existing modules. This includes morphological disambiguation, weighted structural transfer, and lexical selection modules that learn from limited data. The paper also discusses how a platform like Apertium can be a critical part of access to language technology for so-called low-resource languages, which might be ignored or deemed unapproachable by popular corpus-based translation

Abstract

The Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) is the amalgamation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods and the Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure, which are deployed there to improve the overall performance of the system. AIoT can be deployed to achieve more efficient IoT operations; thereby can improve human-machine interactions and provide better data analysis. AI methods can be used to transform IoT data into useful information for the better decision-making processes, and it further increases the overall usability of the system. AIoT frameworks are very useful and applicable in a variety of applications, like security and surveillance system, smart home, intelligent transportation system, smart farming, secure and safe healthcare monitoring, industrial automation and control, eCommerce, logistics operations and control, and many more. However, AIoT frameworks may have issues related to data security and privacy as they are vulnerable to various types of information security-related attacks. These issues further cause the serious consequences, like the unauthorized data leakage and data update. Blockchain is a specific type of database. It is a digital ledger of transactions, which is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems. It stores data in the form of some blocks, which are then chained together. Blockchain is tamper proof and provides more security as compared to the traditional security mechanisms. Hence, blockchain can be integrated in various AIoT applications to provide more security. A generalized blockchain-envisioned secure authentication framework for AIoT has been proposed. The adversary model of blockchain-envisioned secure authentication framework for AIoT is also highlighted that covers most of the potential threats of a kind of communication environment. Various applications of the proposed framework are also discussed. Furthermore, different issues and challenges of the proposed framework are highlighted. In the end, we also provide some future research directions relevant to the proposed framework.

Abstract

COVID-19 infodemic has been spreading faster than the pandemic itself. The misinformation riding upon the infodemic wave poses a major threat to people’s health and governance systems. Managing this infodemic not only requires mitigating misinformation but also an early understanding of underlying psychological patterns. In this study, we present a novel epidemic response management strategy. We analyze the psychometric impact and coupling of COVID19 infodemic with official COVID-19 bulletins at the national and state level in India. We looked at them from the psycholinguistic lens of emotions and quantified the extent and coupling between them. We modified Empath, a deep skipgram-based lexicon builder, for effective capture of health-related emotions. Using this, we analyzed the lead-lag relationships between the time-evolution of these emotions in social media and official bulletins using Granger’s causality. It showed that state bulletins led the social media for some emotions such as Medical Emergency. In contrast, social media led the government bulletins for some topics such as hygiene, government, fun, and leisure. Further insights potentially relevant for policymakers and communicators engaged in mitigating misinformation are also discussed. We also introduce CoronaIndiaDataset, the first social-media-based Indian COVID-19 dataset at the national and state levels with over 5.6 million national and 2.6 million state-level tweets for the first wave of COVID-19 in India and 1.2 million national tweets for the second wave of COVID-19 in India.