Abstract

Background The Empathizing-Systemizing theory proposes that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder are systemizers and prefer Intense music characterized as loud , distorted, electric and percussive musical attributes and aggressive emotional attributes, typical of genres such as heavy metal, hard rock. However, there have been no studies that have tested this theory in a cross cultural setting. Aim The aim of this cross-cultural study is to gather music preferences by Indians and Non-Indians (US and Europe) and verify Baron-Cohen’s hypothesis. Method The Indian population of 20 participants (n=20; male, aged - 18-24 years), were contacted directly while for the Non-Indian population of 30 participants (n=25; US, n=5; Europe, male, aged 18-24) , we used social media platform Reddit (r/asperges and r/autism sub-reddit groups). Semi structured interviews were conducted to gather their demographic information, music they liked and disliked and how listening to music helps them in everyday life. Subsequently a mix of 10 songs each were curated comprising 5 songs they liked and out of the remaining 5 songs , 3 are of the genre they liked and 2 of the genre they disliked, taken from other individual’s playlist in a controlled setting. While playing each song, their likert responses (Like, Neutral, Dislike) were recorded per stimulus. Music Preferences were assessed based on the MUSIC model framework. Results Out of 20 participants, 18 preferred a mix of relaxing, non-aggressive, slow, quiet and instrumental musical attributes categorized as mix of Mellow and Sophisticated factor which helped in improved sleep and social skills and disliked music with loud and rebellious musical attributes categorized as Intense factor which shows that music serves for emotion regulation towards positive emotions in Indian population. In comparison , out of the 30 participants 22 preferred music categorized as Intense factor which brought in a calming factor when stressed and disliked music categorized as a mix of Mellow and Sophisticated factors which shows that music serves to discharge negative emotions in the Non-Indian group. Implications These results provide support to the Empathizing–Systemizing Theory for Non-Indian population but not for Indian population. It also suggests that cultural differences affect emotional arousal. These findings are helpful to build a recommendation system based on an individual’s preferences that can help in arousal regulation, sensory modulation difficulties commonly found among individuals with ASD.

Abstract

Crucial phases in aerial transportation and de- livery of suspended payloads are the clasping and unclasping of the payload to the cable. During these phases, along with the uncertainties in the quadrotor and in the environment, the inevitable payload swings induced by the human interaction or by other external interaction will create additional state- dependent uncertainties; such uncertainties pose a significant challenge in terms of control. If they continue unabated, these uncertainties can cause safety hazard for the quadrotor, the payload and, most importantly, for the human operating the clasping/unclasping tasks. As the state-of-the-art adaptive controllers cannot tackle such uncertainties or considers them as bounded terms, this paper presents an adaptive anti-swing controller where all uncertainties are taken in a state-dependent form. This choice is made to better capture uncertain clasping and unclasping operations of the suspended payload. The closed-loop stability is studied analytically and the real-time experiments confirm significant performance improvements for the proposed scheme over the state of the art.

Abstract

We present CoPara, the first publicly available paragraph-level (n-way aligned) multilingual parallel corpora for Dravidian languages. The collection contains 2856 paragraph/passage pairs between English and four Dravidian languages. We source the parallel paragraphs from the New India Samachar magazine and align them with English as a pivot language. We do human and artificial evaluations to validate the high-quality alignment and richness of the parallel paragraphs of a range of lengths. To show one of the many ways this dataset can be wielded, we finetuned IndicBART, an S2S transformer model on NMT for all XX-En pairs of languages in CoPara which perform better than existing sentence-level models on standard benchmarks (like BLEU) on sentence level translations and longer text too. We show how this dataset can enrich a model trained for a task like this, with more contextual cues and beyond sentence understanding even in low-resource settings like that of Dravidian languages. Finally, the dataset and models are made available publicly at GitHub to help advance research in Dravidian NLP, parallel multilingual, and beyond sentence-level tasks like NMT, etc.

Abstract

Deep learning assisted disease diagnosis using chest radiol- ogy images to assess severity of various respiratory conditions has gar- nered a lot of attention after the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Under- standing characteristic features associated with the disease in radiology images, along with variations observed from patient-to-patient and with the progression of disease, is important while building such models. In this work, we carried out comparative analysis of various deep architec- tures with the proposed attention-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model with customized bottleneck residual module (Attn-CNN) in classifying chest CT images into three categories, COVID-19, Normal, and Pneumonia. We show that the attention model with fewer parame- ters achieved better classification performance compared to state-of-the- art deep architectures such as EfficientNet-B7, Inceptionv3, ResNet-50 and VGG-16, and customized models proposed in similar studies such as COVIDNet-CT, CTnet-10, COVID-19Net, etc.

Abstract

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Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurological disorder that affects the nerves responsible for controlling movements. Automatic detection methods used for PD detection from the speech signal are important as they offer benefits such as reliability, repeatability, and cost-effectiveness. In this paper, cepstral features derived from zero-time windowing (ZTW) based time-frequency analysis method for automatic detection of PD were explored. This study used the PC-GITA database to evaluate the performance using support vector machine classifier and neural networks. The performance of the system is also compared with conventional mel-frequency cepstral coeffcients (MFCCs) features. Cepstral features derived from ZTW method shown better performance than baseline feature. The best performance of the PD detection system obtained using the cepstral features derived from ZTW method in terms of classification accuracy is 73.6% . Index Terms—Parkinson’s Disease, Zero-time windowing, Automatic detection methods using speech signal.

Abstract

The phenomenon of intentional binding pertains to the perceived connection between a voluntary action and its anticipated result. When an individual intends an outcome, it appears to subjectively extend in time due to a pre-activation of the intended result, particularly evident at shorter action-outcome delays. However, there is a concern that the operationalization of intention might have led to a mixed interpretation of the outcome expansion attributed to the pre-activation of intention, given the sensitivity of time perception and intentional binding to external cues that could accelerate the realization of expectations. To investigate the expansion dynamics of an intended outcome, we employed a modified version of the temporal bisection task in two experiments. Experiment 1 considered the action-outcome delay as a within-subject factor, while experiment 2 treated it as a between-subject factor. The results revealed that the temporal expansion of an intended outcome was only evident under the longer action-outcome delay condition. We attribute this observation to working memory demands and attentional allocation due to temporal relevancy, and not due to pre-activation. The discrepancy in effects across studies is explained by operationalizing different components of the intentional binding effect, guided by the cue integration theory. Moreover, we discussed speculative ideas regarding the involvement of specific intentions based on the proximal intent distal intent (PIDI) theory, and whether causality plays a role in temporal binding. Our study contributes to the understanding of how intention influences time perception and sheds light on how various methodological factors, cues, and delays can impact the dynamics of temporal expansion associated with an intended outcome.

Abstract

The intentional binding (IB) phenomenon reflects a perceived attraction between a voluntary action and an intendedconsequence. Recent research has shown that during IB, intended outcomes expand in time. Although, this effect was significant only for shorter action-outcome delays. However, literature on IB suggests it can also exist for long delays. To address this, we implemented a temporal reproduction task to observe the expansion of an intended outcome. Results revealed the expansion of an intended outcome in the shorter and longer action-outcome delays. These results were discussed under the PIDI (proximal intent distal intent) framework since, using this methodology, both types of intention can be operationalised. Proximal for shorter delays under the motor action, and distal for longer delays as the inference made towards the objective duration to be reproduced. Our implementation allows a robust way to observe the temporal dynamics of an intended outcome, irrespective of the action-outcome delay.

Abstract

Lack of diverse perspectives causes neutrality bias in Wikipedia content leading to millions of worldwide readers getting exposed by potentially inaccurate information. Hence, neutrality bias detection and mitigation is a critical problem. Although previous studies have proposed effective solutions for English, no work exists for Indian languages. First, we contribute two large datasets, mWIKIBIAS and mWNC, covering 8 languages, for the bias detection and mitigation tasks respectively. Next, we investigate the effectiveness of popular multilingual Transformer-based models for the two tasks by modeling detection as a binary classification problem and mitigation as a style transfer problem. We make the code and data publicly available.

Abstract

Subjective bias in Wikipedia textual data is a significant problem and affects millions of readers worldwide. Though some monolingual work has been done in classifying and debiasing biased text in resource-rich languages, the low-resource languages with large numbers of speakers remain unattended. We present an approach for the dual problems of multilingual bias detection and its mitigation with a thorough analysis. In this work, we establish competitive baselines on our preliminary approach, which includes classification-based modelling for bias detection on a multilingual dataset curated from existing monolingual sources. For the problem of bias mitigation, we follow the style transfer paradigm and model using transformer-based seq2seq architectures. We also discuss several approaches for further improvement in both problems as a part of our ongoing work.