Using Generic Summarization to Improve Music Information Retrieval Tasks

In order to satisfy processing time constraints, many MIR tasks process only a segment of the whole music signal. This practice may lead to decreasing performance, since the most important information for the tasks may not be in those processed segments. In this paper, we leverage generic summarization algorithms, previously applied to text and speech summarization, to summarize items in music datasets. These algorithms build summaries, that are both concise and diverse, by selecting appropriate segments from the input signal which makes them good candidates to summarize music as well. We evaluate the summarization process on binary and multiclass music genre classification tasks, by comparing the performance obtained using summarized datasets against the performances obtained using continuous segments (which is the traditional method used for addressing the previously mentioned time constraints) and full songs of the same original dataset. We show that GRASSHOPPER, LexRank, LSA, MMR, and a Support Sets-based Centrality model improve classification performance when compared to selected 30-second baselines. We also show that summarized datasets lead to a classification performance whose difference is not statistically significant from using full songs. Furthermore, we make an argument stating the advantages of sharing summarized datasets for future MIR research.Comment: 24 pages, 10 tables; Submitted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processin

Marketing interno : uma proposta para o setor turístico açoriano

Dissertação de Mestrado, Ciências Económicas e Empresariais, 17 de fevereiro de 2017, Universidade dos Açores.No atual contexto de grande desenvolvimento e mudanças profundas no setor turístico dos Açores, ganha cada vez maior relevância, num mercado composto maioritariamente por atividades de alto contato, desenvolver mecanismos capazes de garantir o crescimento e retenção dos melhores colaboradores, otimizando os custos, e assegurando a entrega de um serviço de excelência. Esta investigação pretende, dessa forma, expor o Marketing Interno como o novo caminho a seguir nesse sentido, analisando a evolução do construto, quer a nível teórico, desde os conceitos que estão na sua raiz, até à sua conceção e evolução para o estado atual, quer a nível prático, através da análise de uma série de casos de estudo documentados. Também é efetuado um estudo estatístico utilizando um inquérito de medição de satisfação profissional, o Índice Descritivo do Trabalho, aplicado a 119 colaboradores, para determinar se é justificável a implementação do Marketing Interno nas empresas hoteleiras açorianas. É demonstrado que entre amostra em estudo, a satisfação profissional não é reduzida, no entanto, a aplicação de práticas e políticas de Marketing Interno poderão de igual modo ser justificáveis, dado que os incentivos monetários tradicionais não parecem ter grande peso na criação dessa mesma satisfação, e estes mecanismos asseguram vantagens sustentadas e competitivas que vão de encontro às necessidades que se detetam no setor, na Região, atualmente.ABSTRACT: In the current context of great development and profound changes in the tourism sector of the Azores, a market comprised mainly by high contact activities, it becomes ever more relevant the need to develop mechanisms capable of guaranteeing the growth and retaining of the best staff, optimizing costs and assuring the delivery of excellent service. The present investigation intends to present Internal Marketing as a new course of action in this sense, analysing the evolution of the construct, either theoretically, starting with the concepts that are at it’s roots, all the way up to the conception and evolution to the present day, either in a practical sense, through the analysis of a series of documented case studies. A statistical study is also performed, employing a survey that measures job satisfaction. The Job Descriptive Index, distributed between 119 respondents, to determine if the implementation of Internal Marketing in the azorian hotel enterprises is justified. It is demonstrated that job satisfaction is not low for the studied sample, but the application of Internal Marketing practices and policies might still be justifiable, since traditional monetary incentives don’t seem to have much of an impact on the building of job satisfaction in this context, and these mechanisms assure competitive and sustained advantages, which meets the current needs detected in this sector, for the Region in question, in the present day

The conformal transformation's controversy: what are we missing?

An alternative interpretation of the conformal transformations of the metric is discussed according to which the latter can be viewed as a mapping among Riemannian and Weyl-integrable spaces. A novel aspect of the conformal transformation's issue is then revealed: these transformations relate complementary geometrical pictures of a same physical reality, so that, the question about which is the physical conformal frame, does not arise. In addition, arguments are given which point out that, unless a clear statement of what is understood by "equivalence of frames" is made, the issue is a semantic one. For definiteness, an intuitively "natural" statement of conformal equivalence is given, which is associated with conformal invariance of the field equations. Under this particular reading, equivalence can take place only if the metric is defined up to a conformal equivalence class. A concrete example of a conformal-invariant theory of gravity is then explored. Since Brans-Dicke theory is not conformally invariant, then the Jordan's and Einstein's frames of the theory are not equivalent. Otherwise, in view of the alternative approach proposed here, these frames represent complementary geometrical descriptions of a same phenomenon. The different points of view existing in the literature are critically scrutinized on the light of the new arguments.Comment: 17 pages, no figures. version accepted by General Relativity and Gravitation journa

On the Application of Generic Summarization Algorithms to Music

Several generic summarization algorithms were developed in the past and successfully applied in fields such as text and speech summarization. In this paper, we review and apply these algorithms to music. To evaluate this summarization's performance, we adopt an extrinsic approach: we compare a Fado Genre Classifier's performance using truncated contiguous clips against the summaries extracted with those algorithms on 2 different datasets. We show that Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR), LexRank and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) all improve classification performance in both datasets used for testing.Comment: 12 pages, 1 table; Submitted to IEEE Signal Processing Letter

Deep Dialog Act Recognition using Multiple Token, Segment, and Context Information Representations

Dialog act (DA) recognition is a task that has been widely explored over the years. Recently, most approaches to the task explored different DNN architectures to combine the representations of the words in a segment and generate a segment representation that provides cues for intention. In this study, we explore means to generate more informative segment representations, not only by exploring different network architectures, but also by considering different token representations, not only at the word level, but also at the character and functional levels. At the word level, in addition to the commonly used uncontextualized embeddings, we explore the use of contextualized representations, which provide information concerning word sense and segment structure. Character-level tokenization is important to capture intention-related morphological aspects that cannot be captured at the word level. Finally, the functional level provides an abstraction from words, which shifts the focus to the structure of the segment. We also explore approaches to enrich the segment representation with context information from the history of the dialog, both in terms of the classifications of the surrounding segments and the turn-taking history. This kind of information has already been proved important for the disambiguation of DAs in previous studies. Nevertheless, we are able to capture additional information by considering a summary of the dialog history and a wider turn-taking context. By combining the best approaches at each step, we achieve results that surpass the previous state-of-the-art on generic DA recognition on both SwDA and MRDA, two of the most widely explored corpora for the task. Furthermore, by considering both past and future context, simulating annotation scenario, our approach achieves a performance similar to that of a human annotator on SwDA and surpasses it on MRDA.Comment: 38 pages, 7 figures, 9 tables, submitted to JAI