Three New Corpora at the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals - and a First Step Towards Distributed Web-Based Recording

The Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals has released three new speech corpora for both industrial and academic use: a) Hempels Sofa contains recordings of up to 60 seconds of non-scripted telephone speech, b) ZipTel is a corpus with telephone speech covering postal addresses and telephone numbers from a real world application, and c) RVG-J, an extension of the original Regional Variants of German corpus with juvenile speakers. All three corpora were transcribed orthographically according to the SpeechDat annotation guidelines using the WWWTranscribe annotation software. Recently, BAS has begun to investigate performing large-scale audio recordings via the web, and RVG-J has become the testbed for this type of recording

Collapse of composite tubes under end moments

Cylindrical tubes of moderate wall thickness such as those proposed for the original space station truss, may fail due to the gradual collapse of the tube cross section as it distorts under load. Sometimes referred to as the Brazier instability, it is a nonlinear phenomenon. This paper presents an extension of an approximate closed form solution of the collapse of isotropic tubes subject to end moments developed by Reissner in 1959 to include specially orthotropic material. The closed form solution was verified by an extensive nonlinear finite element analysis of the collapse of long tubes under applied end moments for radius to thickness ratios and composite layups in the range proposed for recent space station truss framework designs. The finite element analysis validated the assumption of inextensional deformation of the cylindrical cross section and the approximation of the material as specially orthotropic

Multi-Tier Annotations in the Verbmobil Corpus

In very large and diverse scientific projects where as different groups as linguists and engineers with different intentions work on the same signal data or its orthographic transcript and annotate new valuable information, it will not be easy to build a homogeneous corpus. We will describe how this can be achieved, considering the fact that some of these annotations have not been updated properly, or are based on erroneous or deliberately changed versions of the basis transcription. We used an algorithm similar to dynamic programming to detect differences between the transcription on which the annotation depends and the reference transcription for the whole corpus. These differences are automatically mapped on a set of repair operations for the transcriptions such as splitting compound words and merging neighbouring words. On the basis of these operations the correction process in the annotation is carried out. It always depends on the type of the annotation as well as on the position and the nature of the difference, whether a correction can be carried out automatically or has to be fixed manually. Finally we present a investigation in which we exploit the multi-tier annotations of the Verbmobil corpus to find out how breathing is correlated with prosodic-syntactic boundaries and dialog acts. 1

Progressive collapse analysis of high-rise building with 3-D finite element modeling method

Using the general purpose finite element package ABAQUS, 3-D finite element a model representing 20 storey buildings were first built by the authors to perform the progressive collapse analysis. Shell elements and beam elements were used to simulate the whole building incorporating nonlinear material characteristics and non-linear geometric behavior. The modeling techniques were described in detail. Numerical results are compared with the experimental data and good agreement is obtained. Using this model, the structural behavior of the building under the sudden loss of columns for different structural systems and different scenarios of column removal were assessed in detail. The models accurately displayed the overall behavior of the 20 storey buildings under the sudden loss of columns, which provided important information for the additional design guidance on progressive collapse

Numerical Simulation of Nonoptimal Dynamic Equilibrium Models

In this paper we present a recursive method for the computation of dynamic competitive equilibria in models with heterogeneous agents and market frictions. This method is based upon a convergent operator over an expanded set of state variables. The fixed point of this operator defines the set of all Markovian equilibria. We study approximation properties of the operator as well as the convergence of the moments of simulated sample paths. We apply our numerical algorithm to two growth models, an overlapping generations economy with money, and an asset pricing model with financial frictions.Heterogeneous agents, taxes, externalities, financial frictions, competitive equilibrium, computation, simulation