The paper points to problematic and usually neglected aspects of using listening tests for TTS evaluation. It shows that simple random selection of phrases to be listened to may not cover those cases which are relevant to the evaluated TTS system. Also, it shows that a reliable phrase set cannot be chosen without a deeper knowledge of the distribution of differences in synthetic speech, which a...

In marketing and advertising, developing and managing brands value represent the core activities performed by companies. Successful brands attract buyers and adopters, which in turn increase the companies’ value. Given a set of user-item adoption data, can we infer brand effects from users adopting items? To answer this question, we develop the Brand Item Topic Model (BITM) that incorporates us...

BACKGROUND Back pain represents a substantial burden globally, ranking first in a recent assessment among causes of years lived with disability. Though back pain is widely studied among working age adults, there are gaps with respect to basic descriptive epidemiology among seniors, especially in the United States. Our goal was to describe how pain, function and health-related quality of life va...

Abstract. We present a Bayesian analysis for recurrent events data using a nonhomogeneous mixed Poisson point process with a dynamic subject-specific frailty function and a dynamic baseline intensity func- tion. The dynamic subject-specific frailty employs a dynamic piecewise constant function with a known pre-specified grid and the baseline in- tensity uses an unknown grid for the piecewise ...