This paper addresses the problem of recognising speech in the presence of a competing speaker. We employ a speech fragment decoding technique that treats segregation and recognition as coupled problems. Data-driven techniques are used to segment a spectro-temporal representation into a set of spectro-temporal fragments, such that each fragment is dominated by one or other of the speech sources....

Previous approaches to the problem of measuring similarity between automatically generated topics have been based on comparison of the topics’ word probability distributions. This paper presents alternative approaches, including ones based on distributional semantics and knowledgebased measures, evaluated by comparison with human judgements. The best performing methods provide reliable estimate...

Importance measures in reliability engineering are used to identify weak areas of a system and signify the roles of components in either causing or contributing to proper functioning of the system. Traditional importance measures for multistate systems mainly concern reliability importance of an individual component and seldom consider the utility performance of the system. This paper extends t...

The reliability of listeners' ratings of voice quality is a central issue in voice research because of the clinical primacy of such ratings and because they are the standard against which other measures are evaluated. However, an extensive literature review indicates that both intrarater and interrater reliability fluctuate greatly from study to study. Further, our own data indicate that rating...

Formula scoring (FS) is the use of a don't know option (DKO) with subtraction of points for wrong answers. Its effect on construct validity and reliability of progress test scores, is subject of discussion. Choosing a DKO may not only be affected by knowledge level, but also by risk taking tendency, and may thus introduce construct-irrelevant variance into the knowledge measurement. On the othe...

Multi-State System (MSS) is mathematical model that is used in reliability engineering for the representation of initial investigated object (system). In a MSS, both the system and its components may experience more than two states (performance levels). One of possible description of MSS is a structure function that is defined correlation between a system components states and system performanc...

This study focuses on the comparison of expert assessment of virtual surgical procedures through Objective Structured Assessment of Technical Skills (OSATS) with the automatic assessment and feedback provided by a surgical simulator for hysteroscopic procedures. The existing multi-metric scoring system of the simulator was extended to include hysteroscopic myomectomy. The original OSATS was als...

a State Key Laboratory ofWater Resources andHydropower Engineering Science, Key Laboratory of RockMechanics inHydraulic Structural Engineering,Ministry of Education,WuhanUniversity, 8 Donghu South Road, Wuhan 430072, PR China b School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, PR China c Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Hong Kong Universit...