Abstract

Event detection is a key aspect of story development which is composed of multiple narrative layers. Most of the narratives are template-based and follow a narration theory. In this paper, we demonstrate a narrative from events detected in the international relations domain along with classification of events using our novel mediation ontology. We also introduce a novel method of classifying events through the mediation ontology. Our methodology involves action classification based on the verb categorization of Beth Levin, its arguments determined by universal dependencies and word2vec. The selected feature space is a result of mapping language entities to ontological entities where we obtain substantially good results. The narration also presents interactions of international actors over various topics as well as other visualizations.

Abstract

The domain of cultural mapping deals with capturing and representing knowledge regarding diverse tangible and intangible aspects of cultural heritage, which involve hybrid data sets from incompatible sources with different terminologies and representational schemas. The complex schema integration problem in this domain can be addressed efficiently by use of formal ontologies which provide universal schema to represent data from heterogeneous sources. The paper describes an abstraction over the CIDOC CRM (ISO 21127:2014) ontology for the purpose of the cultural mapping of villages of India and discuss with case studies how cultural information in context of Indian villages can be captured, preserved and new relationships between cultural entities visualized using this ontology.

Abstract

The task of fact-checking has been formalised as the assessment of the truthfulness of a claim. Be it a political proclamation or a technological development, verification of a new tidbit of information before its propagation to the general public is of utmost importance. Failing to do so leads to the spread of misinformation, which is a devious tool. Fact-checking is commonly performed by journalists, manually looking up information pertaining to the statement in question. This is a drawn out and tedious process with a chance of the concerned person not covering the domain exhaustively. Some of this effort is reduced by the use of knowledge bases created over a period of time. In this work under Task 2 (Factuality) of the CLEF 2018 CheckThat! Lab, we detail a neural network based methodology which models the textual data of a claim based on various representations of its words and characters. An affixed attention mechanism allows us to encapsulate linguistic features common in false claims. We achieve an accuracy of 39.57% on the task dataset.

Abstract

In this report, we present our system for the 4th Computational Linguistics Scientific Document Summarization Shared Task (CLSciSumm 2018), which poses the challenge of identifying the spans of text in a reference paper (RP) that most accurately reflect a citation (i.e. citance) from another paper to the RP and identifying the discourse facet of the corresponding text. We modeled Task1A as Classification Prob-lem which classifies a pair of sentences into classes paraphrase and nonparaphrase. We used Convolutional Neural Network along-with transfer learning for this. Task1B is solved as multi label classification problem.

Abstract

Fricatives are produced by creating a turbulence in the air– flow by passing it through a stricture in the vocal tract cavity. Fricatives are characterized by their noise–like behavior, which makes it difficult to analyze. Difference in the place of articulation leads to different classes of fricatives. Identification of fricative segment boundaries in speech helps in improving the performance of several applications. The present study attempts towards the identification and classification of fricative segments in continuous speech, based on the statistical behavior of instantaneous spectral characteristics. The proposed method uses parameters such as the dominant resonance frequencies, the center of gravity along with the statistical moments of the spectrum obtained using the zero time windowing (ZTW) method. The ZTW spectra exhibits a high temporal resolution and therefore gives accurate segment boundaries in speech. The proposed algorithm is tested on the TIMIT dataset for English language. A high identification rate of 97.5% is achieved for segment boundaries of the sibilant fricative class. Voiced nonsibilants show a lower identification rate than their voiceless counterparts due to their vowel–like spectral characteristics. A high classification rate of 93.2% is achieved be

Abstract

Impulse-like characteristics of excitation occur at the glottal closure instant (GCI) due to sharp closure of the vibrating vocal folds in each glottal cycle. The GCIs are detected from the excitation component of the speech signal, and the excitation component is derived using inverse filtering or its variants. In this paper we propose a method for GCI detection based on single frequency filtering (SFF) of the speech signal. The SFF output has high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) property in speech regions. The variance (across frequency) contour computed from the SFF output show rapid changes around the GCIs, and these rapid changes can be observed even when the speech signal is degraded. Thus the GCI locations can be extracted even from degraded speech using the SFF analysis. The robustness of the method is demonstrated for several cases of degradation of speech signal.

Abstract

This paper describes the BUT ‘Jilebi’ team’s speech recognition systems created for the 2018 low resource speech recognition challenge for Indian languages. We investigate modifications of multilingual time-delay neural network (TDNN) architectures with transfer learning and compare them to bi-directional residual memory networks (BRMN) and bi-directional LSTM. Our best submission based on system combination achieved word error rates of 13.92% (Tamil), 14.71% (Telugu) and 14.06% (Gujarati). We present the details of submitted systems and also the post-evaluation analysis done for lexicon discovery using unsupervised word segmentation.

Abstract

In this study, classification of the phonation modes in singing voice is carried out. Phonation modes in singing voice can be described using four categories: breathy, neutral, flow and pressed phonations. Previous studies on the classification of phonation modes use voice quality features derived from inverse filtering which lack in accuracy. This is due to difficulty in deriving the excitation source features using inverse filtering from singing voice. We propose to use the excitation source features that are derived directly from the signal. It is known that, the characteristics of the excitation source vary in different phonation types due to the vibration of the vocal folds together with the respiratory effort (lungs effort). In the present study, we are exploring excitation source features derived from the modified zero frequency filtering (ZFF) method. Apart from excitation source features, we also explore cepstral coefficients derived from single frequency filtering (SFF) method for the analysis and classification of phonation types in singing voice. Index Terms: Singing voice, Excitation source, Ph

Abstract

In this paper, we consider breathy to tense voices, which are often considered to be opposite ends of a voice quality continuum. Along with these, other aspects of a speaker's voice play an important role to convey the information to the listener such as mood, attitude and emotional state. The glottal pulse characteristics in different phonation types vary due to the tension of laryngeal muscles together with the respiratory effort. In the present study, we are deriving the features that can capture effects of excitation on the vocal tract system through a signal processing method, called as zero-time windowing (ZTW) method. The ZTW method gives the instantaneous spectrum which captures the changes in the speech production mechanism, providing higher spectral resolution. The cepstral coefficients derived from ZTW method are used for the classification of phonation types. Along with zero-time windowing cepstral coefficients (ZTWCCs), we use the excitation source features derived from zero frequency filtering (ZFF) method. The excitation features used are: strength of excitation, energy of excitation, loudness measure and ZFF signal energy. Classification experiments using ZTWCC and excitation features reveal a significant improvement in the detection of phonation type compared to the existing voice quality features and MFCC features

Abstract

We show an effective way of adding context information to shallow neural language models. We propose to use Subspace Multinomial Model (SMM) for context modeling and we add the extracted i-vectors in a computationally efficient way. By adding this information, we shrink the gap between shallow feed-forward network and an LSTM from 65 to 31 points of perplexity on the Wikitext-2 corpus (in the case of neural 5-gram model). Furthermore, we show that SMM i-vectors are suitable for domain adaptation and a very small amount of adaptation data (e.g. endmost 5 % of a Wikipedia article) brings a substantial improvement. Our proposed changes are compatible with most optimization techniques used for shallow feedforward LMs.