Abstract-Broadcast News (BN) transcription has been a challenging research area for many years. In the last couple of years the availability of large amounts of roughly transcribed acoustic training data and advanced model training techniques has offered the opportunity to greatly reduce the error rate on this task. This paper describes the design and performance of BN transcription systems which make use of these developments. First the effects of using lightly-supervised training data and advanced acoustic modelling techniques are discussed. The design of a real-time broadcast news recognition system is then detailed using these new models. As system combination has been found to yield large gains in performance, a range of frameworks that allow multiple recognition outputs to be combined are next described. These include the use of multiple types of acoustic models and multiple segmentations. As a contrast a system developed by multiple sites allowing cross-site combination, the "SuperEARS" system, is also described. The various models and recognition configurations are evaluated using several recent BN development and evaluation test sets. These new BN transcription systems can give gains of over 25% relative to the CU-HTK 2003 BN system.

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Fucoidan, a sulfated polysaccharide derived from brown seaweed, is an important material valued for its various biological functions, including anti-coagulation, anti-aging, and immune system support. In this study, we examined the potential of fucoidan as a novel emulsifying agent in BSA (bovine serum albumin)-stabilized emulsion at a neutral pH. We measured the dispersed oil-droplet size, surface zeta-potential and creaming formation of 0.5 wt% BSA emulsion (20 wt% oil fraction) in the absence and presence of fucoidan. The average particle size and zeta-potential value were 625.4 nm and -30.91 mV in only BSA-stabilized emulsion and 745.2 nm and -44.2 mV in 1.0 wt% fucoidan-added BSA emulsion, respectively. This result suggested that some positive charges of the BSA molecules interacted with the negative charges of fucoidan to inhibit the flocculation among the oil droplets. The creaming rate calculated from the backscattering data measured by Turbiscan dramatically decreased in 1.0 wt% fucoidan-added BSA emulsion during storage. Accordingly, the repulsion forces induced among the oil particles coated with 1.0 wt% fucoidan in emulsion solution resulted in significantly increased emulsion stability. The turbidity of the BSA-stabilized emulsion at 500 nm decreased during five days of storage. However, the fucoidan-added BSA emulsion exhibited a higher value of turbidity than the BSA-stabilized emulsion did. In conclusion, an anionic sulfated fucoidan lowered the surface zeta-potential of BSA-coated oil droplets via the electrostatic interaction, and subsequently inhibited the flocculation among the oil droplets, thereby clearly minimizing the creaming and phase separation of the emulsion.

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b-lactoglobulin (b-lg) was covalently bonded with fucoidan through Maillard reaction at 60°C for 96 h under 79% RH condition. The molecular characters of the conjugate were investigated using fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy. And, its thermal properties, surface activity, and zeta-potential were compared with intact b-lg, b-lg-fucoidan mixture, and fucoidan under different pH conditions. AFM indicated that the conjugate was nano-structured, regular sphericalshaped and generally large sized compared to b-lg-fucoidan mixture. CD spectra and FT-IR showed that tertiary structure of b-lg slightly unfolded, but little change in secondary structure occurred. This explained that glycation under Maillard condition resulted in a molten globule state of b-lg. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) data exhibited that fucoidan shifted the temperature of phase transition and improved thermal stability of b-lg molecule. In addition, the conjugate prominently decreased the surface tension with pH-dependency.