Using Prosody to Classify Discourse Relations

Comunicació presentada a: The 18th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2017), celebrada a Estocolm, Suència, del 20 al 24 d'agost de 2017.This work aims to explore the correlation between the discourse structure of a spoken monologue and its prosody by predicting discourse relations from different prosodic attributes. For this purpose, a corpus of semi-spontaneous monologues in English has been automatically annotated according to the Rhetorical Structure Theory, which models coherence in text via rhetorical relations. From corresponding audio files, prosodic features such as pitch, intensity, and speech rate have been extracted from different contexts of a relation. Supervised classification tasks using Support Vector Machines have been performed to find relationships between prosodic features and rhetorical relations. Preliminary results show that intensity combined with other features extracted from intra- and intersegmental environments is the feature with the highest predictability for a discourse relation. The prediction of rhetorical relations from prosodic features and their combinations is straightforwardly applicable to several tasks such as speech understanding or generation. Moreover, the knowledge of how rhetorical relations should be marked in terms of prosody will serve as a basis to improve speech synthesis applications and make voices sound more natural and expressive.This work is part of the KRISTINA project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Grant Agreement number 645012. The second author is partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness through the Ramón y Cajal program. The third and fourth authors are partially funded by ANPCYT PICT 2014-1561, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Air Force Material Command, USAF under Award No. FA9550-15-1-0055

Prevention, Recognition, and Treatment of Pediatric Obesity in the Ambulatory Care Setting

The World Health Organization (WHO) in 1995 described obesity as a chronic disease and one of the most important public health threats and in 2000 reported obesity as a “global epidemic.” The numbers of obese children are increasing in society; moreover, the onset of obesity is occurring at even a younger age than in the past. The prevalence of pediatric obesity is staggering and interventions need to be developed to decrease the risk for chronic and related psychological diseases. The objective of this project was to provide education on utilization of a tool kit to increase the nurse practitioner (NP) participants’ knowledge base in regards to pediatric obesity prevention, recognition, and treatment. As the pre-intervention, a questionnaire was distributed to the participants to measure their knowledge of childhood obesity. An educational session was provided and then the participants utilized a tool kit in their clinical practice. After a two-month period the Project Director met with the participants and distributed the same questionnaire to determine if participant knowledge, skills and perceptions changed after adopting the tool kit principles into their practice. Data analysis was completed utilizing an analysis of both the mode and median for each question to determine whether or not there was a change in the pre and post-intervention responses. An analysis of pre and post-frequency distributions was completed to determine the direction and extent of that change. Statistical significance of each change was tested utilizing the Mann-Whitney U-Test. Mode, median, and statistical significance were calculated utilizing Excel. Post-intervention participants reported that children would not outgrow being overweight, and identified that a significant barrier to pediatric obesity treatment was not the patient, but lack of preparation on the part of NPs. The results supported that increased knowledge did translate into improved treatment practices in the tory care setting. As more NPs are prepared to recognize, prevent, and treat pediatric obesity, the health of our children will improve significantly

High energy supercapattery with an ionic liquid solution of LiClO4

A supercapattery combining an ideally polarized capacitor-like electrode and a battery-like electrode is demonstrated theoretically and practically using an ionic liquid electrolyte containing 1-butyl-1-methylpyrrolidinium tri(pentafluoroethyl)trifluorophosphate (BMPyrrFAP), gamma-butyrolactone (γ-GBL) and LiClO4. The electrochemical deposition and dissolution of lithium metal on a platinum and glass carbon electrode were investigated in this ionic liquid solution. The CVs showed that the fresh electrochemically deposited lithium metal was stable in the electrolyte, which encouraged the investigation of this ionic liquid solution in a supercapattery with a lithium battery negative electrode. The active material counted specific energy of the supercapattery based on a lithium negative electrode and an activated carbon (Act-C) positive electrode could reach 230 W h kg−1 under a galvanostatic charge–discharge current density of 1 mA cm−2. The positive electrode material (Act-C) was also investigated by CV, AC impedance, SEM and BET. The non-uniform particle size and micropores dominated porous structure of the Act-C enabled its electric double layer capacitor (EDLC) behavior in the ionic liquid solution. The measured specific capacitance of the Act-C in this ionic liquid solution is higher than the same Act-C in aqueous solution, which indicates the Act-C can also perform well in the ionic liquid electrolyte

Towards human linguistic machine translation evaluation

When evaluating machine translation outputs, linguistics is usually taken into account implicitly. Annotators have to decide whether a sentence is better than another or not, using, for example, adequacy and fluency criteria or, as recently proposed, editing the translation output so that it has the same meaning as a reference translation, and it is understandable. Therefore, the important fields of linguistics of meaning (semantics) and grammar (syntax) are indirectly considered. In this study, we propose to go one step further towards a linguistic human evaluation. The idea is to introduce linguistics implicitly by formulating precise guidelines. These guidelines strictly mark the difference between the sub-fields of linguistics such as: morphology, syntax, semantics, and orthography. We show our guidelines have a high inter-annotation agreement and wide-error coverage. Additionally, we examine how the linguistic human evaluation data correlate with: among different types of machine translation systems (rule and statistical-based); and with adequacy and fluency.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Implementation of GIS technologies for planning the valorisation of agricultural waste: the TANGO-Circular Project

The volume of waste produced by agricultural activities is constantly rising, due to the continuous increase of crop and livestock production, aimed to cover the nutritional needs of the accreting population of the Planet. According to recent estimations, the total amount of waste produced in the whole EU by the agricultural sector during the period 2010-2016, has been around 18.4 billion tons, which represents an average of 2.6 billion tons/year. This number is slightly exceeding the amount of waste from all other sectors combined. This enormous mass of waste has a significant environmental impact, which needs suitable solutions to reduce the carbon footprint of agriculture, while increasing the economic income for farmers. A promising way to reduce agricultural waste, passes through the valorization of agricultural co-products, by-products and residues, as well as other non-organic materials - such as plastics, widely used in crop cultivation and animal production - after the end of their working life. In order to involve farmers to play an active role on this issue, contributing to transform what they currently consider as a “waste” into a new “resource”, under the perspective of a circular economy and for a more sustainable agriculture, the Project TANGO-Circular has been financed by the EU Erasmus+ Programme. Aim of this Project is to train farmers and other agricultural stakeholders to be involved in finding viable solutions to exploit unusable remains of crops or animal farms, so as to enhance their financial input, while simultaneously contribute to reducing the environmental impact of their agro-livestock activities. With the aim to plan the valorization of agricultural waste, under the TANGO-Circular Project, a Geographical Information System (GIS) has been implemented through an open-access software (Q-GIS). This GIS has been structured into a first part dedicated to the quantification of agricultural waste flows – both organic, coming from agroindustrial activities, and not-organic, such as plastics - and a second part, focused on the spatial distribution of these flows in the study area of the project partners. Through GIS, the areas with high density of agricultural waste have been pointed out, and the suitable location of potential collection centres has been proposed. The maps that have been produced, as well as the GIS database, are always updatable tools, useful also for monitoring and optimizing the sorting and collection of agricultural waste from the farms, their suitable treatments and transport to the collection centers or recycling stations. The implemented GIS methodology has revealed very useful to support farmers and their associations, as well as all public bodies interested to govern the agricultural waste flows, to individuate possible solutions designed for the valorization of these flows, in the perspective of a circular economy. The sustainability and economic, territorial, environmental and social convenience of each form of valorization designed have been investigated, and criticalities associated with each phase of the process and consequent implementation of appropriate solutions to each problem have been addressed. Finally, further possible solutions, aimed at an increasingly better valorization of these flows, have been proposed as well