Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ASR Inspired Syllable Stress Detection for Pronunciation Evaluation Without Using a Supervised Classifier and Syllable Level Features

Automatic syllable stress detection is typically performed with a supervised classiﬁer considering manually annotated stress markings and features computed within the syllable segments derived from phoneme transcriptions and their time-aligned boundaries. However, the manual annotation is tedious and the errors in estimating segmental information could degrade stress detection accuracy. In order to circumvent these, we propose to estimate stress markings in automatic speech recognition (ASR) framework involving ﬁnite-state-transducer (FST) without us-ing annotated stress markings and segmental information. For this, we train the ASR system with native English data along with pronunciation lexicon containing canonical stress markings and decode non-native utterances as pronunciations embedded with stress markings. In the decoding, we use an FST encoded with the pronunciations derived using phoneme transcriptions and the instructions involved in a typical manual annotation. Experiments are conducted on polysyllabic words taken from ISLE corpus containing utterances spoken by Italian and German speakers and using the ASR models trained with three corpora. Among all the three models, the highest stress detection accuracies with the proposed approach respectively on Italian & German speakers are found to be 2.07% & 1.19% higher than and comparable to those with the two supervised classiﬁcation approaches used as baselines.
LONG RUN BEHAVIOUR OF HOUSE PRICES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES : A COMPARATIVE APPROACH

This paper uses cointegration and error correction models in order to examine the long run and short run behaviour of house prices in Eastern European countries, which is then compared to developed EU countries. Four transition (Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Estonia) and three developed countries (Ireland, Spain, and the U.K.) are included in the sample. House prices behaviour for each country is modelled separately as a function of income, interest rates, credit, construction activity, employment and house price persistence. The results of the empirical exercise suggest that house prices, income and house price persistence explain house price changes in the majority of the countries. In half of the countries construction output also explains house price variance, but the magnitude of construction output coefficients is rather small. In the short run house prices are not weakly exogenous, but adjustment coefficients are quite small and sometimes lagged, probably due to the presence of house price persistence.
Improving Transformer-Based Speech Recognition Systems with Compressed Structure and Speech Attributes Augmentation

The end-to-end (E2E) model allows for training of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems without having to consider the acoustic model, lexicon, language model and complicated decoding algorithms, which are integral to conventional ASR systems. Recently, the transformer-based E2E ASR model (ASR-Transformer) showed promising results in many speech recognition tasks. The most common practice is to stack a number of feed-forward layers in the encoder and decoder. As a result, the addition of new layers improves speech recognition performance significantly. However, this also leads to a large increase in the number of parameters and severe decoding latency. In this paper, we propose to reduce the model complexity by simply reusing parameters across all stacked layers instead of introducing new parameters per layer. In order to address the slight reduction in recognition quality we propose to augment the speech inputs with bags-of-attributes. As a result we obtain a highly compressed, efficient and high quality ASR model.
COMPRESSION OF TRANSMULTIPLEXED ACOUSTIC SIGNALS

Transmultiplexers provide many signals over a single transmission line. An example of the 8-channel transmultiplexer is presented. The specific frequency properties of the transmultiplexed signal make it possible to apply the compression methods effectively. Wavelet packets were introduced to split the signal spectrum into its frequency components. The four-level wavelet packet decomposition was provided by means of the discrete Meyer wavelets. The diversity in the frequency of the spectrum values justify applying the entropy coding in lossless compression. The arithmetic and Huffman coding were tested as examples of compression method for transmultiplexed signal. The coding was conducted separately for different subbands. Finally, the advantages and disadvantages of lossless compression methods were compared to each other. 1. TRANSMULTIPLEXERS In transmultiplexing systems [1,3] the input signals are combined for the transmission by a single channel and next recovered by a receiver. Figure 1 shows the classical structure of the 8 = M channel transmultiplexer. The input signals N i s R ∈ in , where { } M i ,. , 2 , 1 ∈ is a signal number, were upsampled, then filtered and finally summed to obtain a composite signal 1 ) 1 ( + − R ∈ N M s which is transmitted over a single transmission channel. At the receiver end, the signal is relayed to the Mchannels of the detransmultiplexation part, filtered and next downsampled [2] to recover the original signals. The upsampling procedure increases M-times and the downsampling procedure decreases M-times the number of samples. Although the number of samples is varying, the time of signal duration does not change because the sampling density decreases M-times for upsampling and increases M-times for the downsampling procedure. Transmultiplexing does not make distortions because digital filters (examples of their frequency characteristics are presented in Figure 2) satisfy the requirements of a perfect reconstruction.
From Electronic Corpora to Online Dictionaries ( on the example of Bulgarian Language Resources )

The paper briefly describes Bulgarian digital language resources, among them corpora, lexical databases, lexicons, and electronic dictionaries, which were developed in the Mathematical Linguistics Department at the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IMI-BAS) in the framework of some international projects. The first Bulgarian electronic corpora and language-specific resources were developed in the EC language technology project MULTEXT-East Multilingual Text Tools and Corpora for Central and Eastern European Languages. The first lexical database for Bulgarian was developed in the EC project CONCEDE Consortium for Central European Dictionary Encoding. These recourses were developed in TEIformat, and thus they are compatible with other TEI-conformant resources. The first Bulgarian-Polish electronic corpora and dictionaries are currently developed in the frame of bilateral collaboration between IMI-BAS and ISSPAS.
Direct Neuron-Wise Fusion of Cognate Neural Networks

This paper proposes a method to create a robust acoustic model by directly fusing multiple neural networks that have dissimilar characteristics without any additional layers/nodes involving retraining procedures. The fused neural networks derive from a shared parent neural network and are referred to as cognate (child) neural networks in this paper. The neural networks are fused by interpolating weight and bias parameters associated with each neuron with a different fusion weight, assuming that cognate neural networks to be fused have the same topology. Therefore, no extra computational cost during decoding is required. The fusion weight is determined by considering a cosine similarity estimated from parameters connecting to the neuron and the fusion is performed for every neuron. Experiments were carried out using a test suite consisting of various acoustic conditions with a wide SNR range, speakers including foreign accented speakers, and speaking styles. From the experiments, the network created by fusing cognate neural networks showed consistent improvement on average compared with the commercialgrade domain-free network originating from the parent model. In addition, we demonstrate that the fusion considering input connections to the neuron achieves the highest accuracy in our experiments.
Modeling metal ion-humic substances 1 complexation in highly saline conditions 2 3

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Modeling metal ion-humic substances complexation in highly saline conditions Rémi Marsac, Nidhu Banik, Johannes Lützenkirchen, Charlotte Catrouillet, Christian Marquardt, Karen Johannesson
Mapping an ethnography of change in teachers of Italian (L2) learning process drama

This paper discusses a longitudinal, participatory case study focused on a group of experienced teachers of Italian (L2), learning to integrate process drama pedagogy in their practice. Process drama is an embodied approach for second language teaching and learning, focusing on the process (drama workshop), rather than the product (performance) aiming to engage learners in a felt-experience of the target language and culture. The paper reports the final leg of a wider study, and synthesizes results on teachers’ tacit knowledge, transformed into knowing-in-action, when using process drama with adult students of Italian (L2).
DO AUDITORS WITH A DEEP POCKET PROVIDE A HIGH QUALI TY AUDIT?

We provide the first empirical evidence on Dye (199 3)’s theory that auditors with deeper pockets are likely to provide a high quality audit. Using a unique, hand-collected data set of Chinese audit firm’s net assets, we find that auditors with great er net assets are associated with a higher propensity to issue a modified opinion, a lower lik elihood of clients committing financial fraud and reporting lower income-increasing discretionary ccruals, and a lower probability of clients reporting small earnings. The effects of auditor de ep pocket are more pronounced for client firms in regions with stronger legal environment and audi t firms organized as partnerships relative to firms organized as limited liability firms. Our res ults hold when we restrict our sample to only those clients audited by a Big 8 auditor. We contri bute to the literature by providing more clarity on the effect of auditor size on audit quality.
The effect of limiting statutory auditors ’ civil liability on financial reporting quality : Empirical evidence on liability caps and earnings management in Europe

The European Commission has recommended that EU member states limit the civil liability of statutory auditors. This paper examines the effect of the existence of a liability cap on financial reporting quality, which is measured by the magnitude of earnings management in audited financial statements. The results from a sample of 1,306 listed companies in six European countries in 2008 indicate that liability caps lead to lower financial reporting quality when a large company is audited by a non-Big 4 auditor. This is consistent with that large companies are more likely to be affected than small and medium size companies because of the fixed threshold nature of the liability caps. As to the auditor type, the findings are consistent with earlier research on the effects of auditor type on financial reporting quality. The findings should be useful when assessing the implications of introducing similar liability limitations.
Cognitive rehabilitation for attention and memory in people with multiple sclerosis: a randomized controlled trial (CRAMMS)

Objective: To assess the clinical and cost-effectiveness of cognitive rehabilitation for attention and memory problems in people with multiple sclerosis. Design: Multicentre, pragmatic, randomized controlled trial. Setting: Community Participants: People with multiple sclerosis aged 18–69 years, who reported cognitive problems in daily life and had cognitive problems on standardized assessment. Interventions: A group cognitive rehabilitation programme delivered in 10 weekly sessions in comparison with usual care. Main measures: The primary outcome was the Multiple Sclerosis Impact Scale Psychological subscale at 12 months after randomization. Secondary outcomes included measures of everyday memory problems, mood, fatigue, cognitive abilities and employment at 6 and 12 months after randomization. Results: In all, 245 participants were allocated to cognitive rehabilitation and 204 to usual care. Mean Multiple Sclerosis Impact Scale Psychological at 12 months was 22.2 (SD = 6.1) for cognitive rehabilitation and 23.4 (SD = 6.0) for usual care group; adjusted difference −0.6, 95% confidence interval (CI) = −1.5 to 0.3, P = 0.20. No differences were observed in cognitive abilities, fatigue or employment. There were small differences in favour of cognitive rehabilitation for the Multiple Sclerosis Impact Scale Psychological at 6 months and everyday memory and mood at 6 and 12 months. There was no evidence of an effect on costs (−£808; 95% CI = −£2248 to £632) or on quality-adjusted life year gain (0.00; 95% CI = −0.01 to 0.02). Conclusion: This rehabilitation programme had no long-term benefits on the impact of multiple sclerosis on quality of life, but there was some evidence of an effect on everyday memory problems and mood.
Consuming Familiarity and Alterity in Domestic Space Transnational Television Practices among Migrants in Norway

The present article addresses how stereotyped constructions of migrants’ television behaviour should be contrasted with empirical investigations into the perceptions and articulated practices of migrants themselves. In order to do this, the article explores how 20 migrant households in Norway make sense of television and TV-related activities in their everyday lives. The analysis, employing the domestication theoretical framework, reveals that TV consumption is a multi-faceted and situationally contingent phenomenon. The “practicing of television” goes beyond the mere viewing of programmes based on ethnic origin. Although transnational broadcasts are important, they are neither uncritically domesticated nor sufficient in creating a sense of stability and belonging for migrant families. Rather, it is television as a total experience that proves to be a crucial element in home construction. The domestication theory offers an analytical framework that allows for the dynamics of household relations to be properly articulated, including the embedding of television within household moral economies.
Effects of Semantic Relationship and Similarity on Memorization and Retrieval

This research examined effects of presenting related words and target words at the same time in intentional vocabulary learning, focusing on a case where the related words share the same category as the target words and are already known to learners. As few previous studies have taken into account whether semantic relatedness of related words are closer to target words or not, this comparison was also integrated into the experimental design of this work. In an experiment, participants intentionally learned a total of 30 words through three methods, 10 words presented alone, 10 provided with closely related words, and the other 10 given with slightly related words. The immediate posttest and the delayed posttest, which was conducted 1 week after learning the words, consisted of two parts. The first part required participants to recall L1 translations of target words, while the second part also provided known, related words as clues. The results indicated the facilitative effect of presenting related words as clues for retrieval, suggesting that learning associates of known words is an effective method for learning vocabulary.
The effect of explicit instruction and auditory/audio-visual training on Chinese learners' acquisition of English intonation

This paper examines the effectiveness of auditory vs. audio-visual training when coupled with explicit instructions on improving perception of intonation meanings by Mandarin-speaking learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). 40 subjects who were involved in the 3-week training process received instructions of intonation forms and functions based on the British approach. While half of them used Audacity (auditory-only) to manage the following self-paced practice, the other half used Praat (audiovisual). The perception experiment was administered by eliciting judgement of interpretations of contrastive intonation patterns with pre-, post-, and delayed post-test design, in comparison with two control groups (10 native RP speakers and 20 Mandarin speakers). It is found that auditory and audio-visual training had similar effect in facilitating perception of intonation meanings, indicating that visualisation does not necessarily improve the processing of intonation. This provides a reconsideration of the preference for audio-visual approach to intonation teaching.
Reclamation of Astragalus By-Product through Dietary Inclusion in Ruminant Diets: Effects on Growth Performance, Nutrient Digestibility, Rumen Fermentation, Blood Biochemical Parameters, and Humoral Immune Response in Sheep

This study was conducted to investigate the effects of Astragalus by-product (ABP) through dietary supplementation at different levels on performance, nutrient digestibility, rumen fermentation, blood metabolites, and immune response in sheep. Twenty-four Doper × Small Tail Han ewes (6-7 months of age; 29.07 ± 2.28 kg initial body weight) were randomly assigned to one of three treatments for a 47 d feeding period. Treatments consisted of the sheep diet supplemented with 0% ABP-control, 10% ABP, or 15% ABP of the diet (dry matter basis). Blood samples were collected on days 0, 15, 30, and 45 of the feeding period. APB supplementation did not affect growth performance and apparent digestibility of organic matter, crude protein, and acid detergent fibre (P > 0.05). However, ether extract digestibility was decreased in the 10% ABP group and increased in the 15% ABP group (P < 0.001), and both 10% ABP and 15% ABP decreased the neutral detergent fibre digestibility (P=0.005). Feeding ABP increased rumen pH (P < 0.001) and ammonia N (P < 0.001) and decreased concentrations of acetate (P=0.007) and propionate (P=0.001) which resultantly increased the acetate-to-propionate ratio (P < 0.001) in ruminal fluid. There were no interaction effects between treatment and sampling time for plasma metabolites and immunity (P > 0.05). However, inclusion of dietary 10% ABP decreased concentrations of plasma cholesterol (P=0.043). Also, plasma concentrations of low-density lipoprotein decreased on days 30 and 45 (P=0.017) of the feeding period. Metabolite concentrations of total protein, albumin, globulin, blood urea N, glucose, triglyceride, and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and humoral immune indicators were not affected (P > 0.05) by dietary ABP supplementation. The results suggest that ABP could be reclaimed through dietary inclusion in animal feed since it had beneficial effects on rumen fermentation patterns and lipid metabolism and had no adverse effects on performance and humoral immunity in sheep.
Semantic descriptions of French derivational relations in a families-and-paradigms framework

This paper proposes a new way to represent morphosemantic regularities in derivational paradigms of French in the context of derivational morphology. Starting from what has already been done in Démonette, a derivational morphological lexical resource for French, we show how structures inspired by Frame Semantics and FrameNet could help with the problem of the eﬃcient representation of morphosemantic regularities in derivational paradigms. This ﬁrst phase of the experiment consisted in the representation of four French derivational subfamilies of the French lexicon with a frame-like structure in order to show how this approach could work.
Zhang Non-invasive detection algorithm of thermal comfort based on computer vision

The waste of building energy consumption is a major challenge in the world. Realtime detection of human thermal comfort is an effective way to deal with this issue. However, due to the difference of personal thermal comfort and changes caused by climatic variations, there is still a long way to reach this target. From another perspective, the current HVAC (heating, ventilating and air-conditioning) systems are reluctant to provide flexible interaction channels to adjust atmosphere which fails to follow continuously increasing requirements from users. All of them indicate the necessity to develop more intelligent detection method for human thermal comfort. In this paper, a non-invasion detection method toward thermal comfort is proposed from two perspectives: macro human postures and skin textures. In posture part, OpenPose is used for detecting the key points’ position coordinates of human body in images, which would be functionalized from the term of thermal comfort. In skin textures, deep neural network is used to regress the images of skin to its temperature. Based on Fanger’s theory of thermal comfort, the results of both parts are satisfying: subjects’ postures can be captured and interpreted into different thermal comfort level: hot, cold and comfort. And the absolute error of prediction from neurons network is less than 0.125 degrees centigrade which is the equipment error of thermometer used in data acquisition. With solutions of this paper, it is promising to non-invasively detect the thermal comfort level of users from postures and skin textures. And the conclusion and future work are discussed in final chapter.
The relationship between hatchling mass and egg volume in the Nile crocodile ( Crocodylus niloticus ) : The productivity of eggs varies

Copyright: © 2019. Authors. Licensee: Die SuidAfrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attibution License. The survival and vitality of Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) hatchlings is important for the success of commercial crocodile farming and the maintenance of wild populations. In this study we describe the relationship between the mass of Nile crocodile hatchlings and the estimated volume of the eggs from which they hatched and, following that, we describe the variation in the ratio between the mass of individual hatchlings and the egg volume from which each hatched (the productivity of the egg) within and among clutches. The volumes of 316 Nile crocodile eggs from 51 clutches were estimated by means of a purpose-made algorithm that uses key dimensions of eggs obtained from photos of the hatched shells. The hatchling from each egg was weighed immediately after hatching. Neither the duration of incubation prior to hatching (P = 0.88) nor the year in which clutches were laid (P = 0.35), nor the number of eggs per clutch (P = 0.57) affected hatchling mass. There exists a strong, linear, positive relationship between the mass of Nile crocodile hatchlings and the estimated volume of the eggs from which they hatched (r = 0.88, P < 0.001, n = 316). Without considering estimated egg volume, 86.9% of the variation in hatchling mass occurs among clutches and 13.1% within clutches. Taking estimated egg volume into account, 59% of the variation in hatchling mass occurs among clutches and 41% within clutches. Egg productivity varied from 0.57 g/ml to 0.81 g/ml, with 45.4% of the variation occurring among clutches and 54.6% within clutches. Further research is required to investigate the relationship between hatchling mass and the growth of hatchlings, as well as between egg productivity and the growth of hatchlings.