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Carson-Berndsen, Julie
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Carson-Berndsen, Julie
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Carson-Berndsen, Julie
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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
- PublicationAn Agent-based Framework for Speech InvestigationThis paper presents a novel agent-based framework for investigating speech recognition which combines statistical data and explicit phonological knowledge in order to explore strategies aimed at augmenting the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. This line of research is motivated by a desire to provide solutions to some of the more notable problems encountered, including in particular the problematic phenomena of coarticulation, underspecified input, and out-ofvocabulary items. This research also seeks to promote the use of deliberative reasoning agents in the speech and natural language processing arenas.
228 - PublicationEmotional response language education: a first ‘in-the-wild’ evaluation(2019-07-10)
; ; This paper reports on the development and testing of Version 3 of the Emotional Response Language Education (ERLE) e-learning platform. An ‘in-the-wild’, heuristic user evaluation with five English as a Foreign Language students from Feng Chia University in Taiwan and one native English speaker in Ireland was performed over three months, with feedback from students informing changes and improvements. The primary goal of the study was to assess the robustness and reliability of a newly integrated speech recognition system to the ERLE platform. The feedback garnered led to the introduction of a tutorial prior to the initial class, a redesign of the buttons and presentation of the ASR output, and an animated response to loud input which causes difficulty for the ASR system. The improved system has since been implemented as a complimentary aid to a first-year English speaking and listening course at the same university in a larger, longitudinal study.340 - PublicationA Multi-Agent Computational Linguistic Approach to Speech Recognition(IJCAI, 2003-08-09)
; ; ; ; This paper illustrates how a multi-agent system implements and governs a computational linguistic model of phonology for syllable recognition. We describe how the Time Map model can be recast as a multi-agent architecture and discuss how constraint relaxation, output extrapolation, parse-tree pruning, clever task allocation, and distributed processing are all achieved in this new architcture.178 - PublicationThe effect of phoneme distribution on perceptual similarity in EnglishThis paper investigates the extent to which native speaker perceptions regarding the similarity between phonemes of English are influenced by their distributional properties. A similarity hierarchy model based on the distribution of consonantal phonemes in the English language was generated by creating phoneme-embeddings from contextual information. We compare this to similarity models based on phonological feature theory and on native speaker perception. Characteristics of the perception-based model are shown to appear in the distribution-based model whilst not being captured by the feature-based model. This not only provides evidence of similarity perceptions being influenced by distributional properties but is an argument for incorporating distributional information alongside phonological features when modelling perceptual similarity.
475Scopus© Citations 6 - PublicationBoTest: a Framework to Test the Quality of Conversational Agents Using Divergent Input Examples(ACM, 2018-03-11)
; ; ; ; ; Quality of conversational agents is important as users have high expectations. Consequently, poor interactions may lead to the user abandoning the system. In this paper, we propose a framework to test the quality of conversational agents. Our solution transforms working input that the conversational agent accurately recognises to generate divergent input examples that introduce complexity and stress the agent. As the divergent inputs are based on known utterances for which we have the 'normal' outputs, we can assess how robust the conversational agent is to variations in the input. To demonstrate our framework we built ChitChatBot, a simple conversational agent capable of making casual conversation.770Scopus© Citations 21