Friday, January 31, 2020

Prosodic Features for Sentence Segmentation Dissertation

Prosodic Features for Sentence Segmentation - Dissertation Example The most emphasis in this approach is put on the duration of pauses between words. Longer pauses are assumed to be sentence boundaries. The word boundary method presupposes that such pauses logically occur only at the end of sentences. This is true on many occasions since the place to pause is really at the end of sentences. The word boundary method is therefore quite useful especially when analyzing short sentences (Stolcke, & Shriberg, 1996, 139). The detection of sentence boundaries is one of the initial steps that lead to the understanding of speech. The fact that speech recognizer output lacks the normal textual cues such as headers, paragraphs, sentence punctuation and capitalization was also mentioned. However, speech provides prosodic information through its durational, intonational and energy characteristics. In addition to its relevance to discourse structure in spontaneous speech and its ability to contribute to various tasks involving the extraction of information; prosod ic cues are naturally unaffected by word identity. It should therefore be possible to improve the robustness of lexical information extraction methods which are based on ASR (Hakkani-Tur et al 1999). Sentence segmentation is required for topic segmentation and is also needed to separate long stretches of audio data before parsing (Shriberg et al 2000). Sentence segmentation is critical for applications that are used for obtaining information from speech because information retrieval techniques such as machine translation, question answering and information extraction were basically developed for text based applications (Shriberg et al 2000; Cuendet et al 2007). Kolar et al (2006, p. 629) indicates that standard automatic speech recognition systems only output a raw stream of words. It therefore means that important structural information such as punctuation is missing. Punctuation defines sentence boundaries and is fundamental to the ability of humans to understand information. Natu ral language processing techniques such as machine translation, information extraction and retrieval text summarization all benefit from sentence boundaries. According to Mrozinski et al (2006) spontaneous speech is generally affected negatively by ungrammatical constructions and consists of false starts, word fragments and repetitions which are representative of useless information. Output from automatic Speech-To-Text (STT) system is affected by additional problems as the word recognition error rates in spontaneous speech is still high. Sentence segmentation can lead to an improvement in the readability and usability of such data; after which automatic speech summarization can be used to extract important data. Magimai-Doss et al (2007) indicates that the aim of sentence segmentation is the enrich the improve the unstructured word sequence output for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems with sentence boundaries in order to make further processing by humans and machines easie r. Improvements in performance were shown in speech processing tasks such as: speech summarization, named entity extraction and part-of-speech tagging in speech, machine translation, and for aiding human readability of the output of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems when sentence boundary information was provided. Annotation relating to sentence boundary was found to be useful in the determination of â€Å"semantically and prosodically coherent boundaries for

Thursday, January 23, 2020

Eye of the beholder :: essays research papers

?Beauty is in the eye of the beholder? is one of the most commonly known proverbs. In the Twilight Zone?s short film, ?Eye of the Beholder? that same proverb is used as a metaphor to demonstrate how beauty and acceptance are illustrated in the real world. The film tells the story of a woman whose hideously deformed face has made her an outcast all of her life. Now she faces her nearly a dozen and final operation for a last chance to look normal with the help of unseen surgeons. First, in the ?Eye of the Beholder? we see the bandaged woman?s craving for normality. She is constantly haunted by the memory of a child screaming because of her physical deformed appearance. We are also reminded that those who look ?different? will be sent of to an isolated place with others of the same ?disability.? With that being said a sense of Nazism idealistic society comes to mind. For example, the Nazi?s sent those who looks different than the normal beautiful blued eyed, blond Germans, to a concentration camp. Moreover, the woman in the ?eye of the Beholder? not only wanted beauty but she felt the need for acceptance. She was denied this when she was taken to a disability camp. It?s amazing how in the movie, people were separated and treated unequally because of their physical appearances, and as result, they could not share the same society. This is in fact is a metaphor for how discrimination was once in extreme existence in this society. For example, African Americans once had to use: different bathrooms, water fountains, and were even segregated to non-white school. They were even isolated to the worse parts of the cities. In conclusion, in the Twilight Zone?s short film, ?Eye of the Beholder? the themes of beauty and acceptance are used as a metaphor for the

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

The Growth Stage

The growth stage brings many challenges to blended value businesses, and one of the most significant concerning mission preservation involves changes in leadership during scaling, especially to the role of the founder. It is common in early-stage businesses for the founder to guide all aspects of the organization. When companies begin to grow, however, things start to change. From this moment onward, the involvement of the founder with the company must evolve as much as the firm itself does. At this point, formal governance systems and processes must be created to take the place of the informal ones employed during the start-up phase. The transfer of responsibility from the charismatic individual, the founder, to the governing board is one hallmark of a more substantial shift toward a more systemized, collaborative approach that needs to take place in all businesses as they grow (Clark, Emerson & Thornley, 2014). For social entrepreneurships, it can signal a dangerous moment for the social mission. Often the founder's leadership—his or her passion and vision—is what establishes the clear connection between the business and mission in the first place. As the leadership shifts from founder to governing board, new ways need to be found to embed mission in the systems that will provide direction for the business from this point on. Shifting leadership from founder to board can be a challenge for many types of organizations, but it may present a particular obstacle for social entrepreneurships. The figure of the founder looms large in the social impact world encouraged by a high number of prizes and programs aimed at individual entrepreneurs. Partly as a result of such well-meaning support efforts, some founders have risen to personal prominence alongside their blended value companies, becoming public faces for their businesses, ambassadors for their brand with high media, and field level visibility. At the growth stage, such over-emphasis on founders can create the conditions under which so-called founder's syndrome can arise.

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

The relationship between the media and society is...

The relationship between the media and society is regularly changingas media technologies are constantly developing, and its audiences are continuously adapting. ]Therelationship has been constant since the beginning of the 20th century, so inevitably it has certain effectson the people it has been reaching out to for so many years. The communicators of media messages can hold power over their audiences by uses of agenda setting, which is the media’s ability to raise importance of issues through repetitive news reporting (Severin and Tankard 2010) and propaganda techniques, but audiences also sometimes play an active role in its reception and selection of messages they receive. Elihu Katz says that effects of media are related to†¦show more content†¦It says that media messages have universal effects on its audiences that receive them (Severin and Tankard 2010), signifying a weak and passive audience that is easily susceptible to persuasion. This persuasion can be e ither negative or positive, and the theory claims that the audience will believe anything they see or hear. The bullet theory has less research than other theories, because of the fact that it categorizes audiences broadly, and it is more difficult to conduct studies on a general claim. However, a study was done that examined how the bullet theory may have applied to society by usage of propaganda in World War I (Severin and Tankard 2010). The US nation was collectivelyterrified of the power that Adolf Hitler had in his control over his country, and media messages at the time enhanced this fear by constantly stating that Hitler could have the same type of effective influence on the American people in forthcoming years (Severin and Tankard 2010). Influential figures such as Walt Disney, made propaganda pieces like cartoons detailing the horrible ways of the Nazi Germans at the time, shaping the way in which audiences looked at the issues of the war (Shale 1982). The example is vali d, butalso relatively weak feared perceptions of the actions of Hitler during WWII and after were widely held globally. It is difficult to measure such an extreme