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Abstract-This paper presents a hybrid music recommender system that ranks musical pieces while efficiently maintaining collaborative and content-based data, i.e., rating scores given by users and acoustic features of audio signals. This hybrid approach overcomes the conventional tradeoff between recommendation accuracy and variety of recommended artists. Collaborative filtering, which is used on e-commerce sites, cannot recommend nonbrated pieces and provides a narrow variety of artists. Content-based filtering does not have satisfactory accuracy because it is based on the heuristics that the user's favorite pieces will have similar musical content despite there being exceptions. To attain a higher recommendation accuracy along with a wider variety of artists, we use a probabilistic generative model that unifies the collaborative and content-based data in a principled way. This model can explain the generative mechanism of the observed data in the probability theory. The probability distribution over users, pieces, and features is decomposed into three conditionally independent ones by introducing latent variables. This decomposition enables us to efficiently and incrementally adapt the model for increasing numbers of users and rating scores. We evaluated our system by using audio signals of commercial CDs and their corresponding rating scores obtained from an e-commerce site. The results revealed that our system accurately recommended pieces including nonrated ones from a wide variety of artists and maintained a high degree of accuracy even when new users and rating scores were added.Index Terms-Aspect model, hybrid collaborative and contentbased recommendation, incremental training, music recommender system, probabilistic generative model.

This paper presents a robot audition system that recognizes simultaneous speech in the real world by using robotembedded microphones. We have previously reported Missing Feature Theory (MFT) based integration of Sound Source Separation (SSS) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for building robust robot audition. We demonstrated that a MFTbased prototype system drastically improved the performance of speech recognition even when three speakers talked to a robot simultaneously. However, the prototype system had three problems; being offline, hand-tuning of system parameters, and failure in Voice Activity Detection (VAD). To attain online processing, we introduced FlowDesigner-based architecture to integrate sound source localization (SSL), SSS and ASR. This architecture brings fast processing and easy implementation because it provides a simple framework of shared-object-based integration. To optimize the parameters, we developed Genetic Algorithm (GA) based parameter optimization, because it is difficult to build an analytical optimization model for mutually dependent system parameters. To improve VAD, we integrated new VAD based on a power spectrum and location of a sound source into the system, since conventional VAD relying only on power often fails due to low signal-to-noise ratio of simultaneous speech. We, then, constructed a robot audition system for Honda ASIMO. As a result, we showed that the system worked online and fast, and had a better performance in robustness and accuracy through experiments on recognition of simultaneous speech in a noisy and echoic environment.

This paper describes a system that can automatically synchronize between polyphonic musical audio signals and corresponding lyrics. Although there were methods that can synchronize between monophonic speech signals and corresponding text transcriptions by using Viterbi alignment techniques, they cannot be applied to vocals in CD recordings because accompaniment sounds often overlap with vocals. To align lyrics with such vocals, we therefore developed three methods: a method for segregating vocals from polyphonic sound mixtures, a method for detecting vocal sections, and a method for adapting a speech-recognizer phone model to segregated vocal signals. Experimental results for 10 Japanese popular-music songs showed that our system can synchronize between music and lyrics with satisfactory accuracy for 8 songs.

We i)rcsent a method to r(:aliz(: th:xil)le mix(;(linitiative dialogue, in which the syst(:m can mak(, etti:ctive COlflirmation mad guidmn(:(: using (-oncel)t-leve,1 confidcn('e mcmsur(,s (CMs) derived from st)eech recognizer output in ord(:r to handl(: sl)eech recognition errors. W(: d(:tine two con('et)t-level CMs, which are oil COllt(~,Iltwords and on semantic-attrilmtes, using 10-best outtmts of the Sl)e(:ch r(:cognizt:r and l)arsing with t)hrmse-level grammars. Content-word CM is useflll for s(:lecting 1)]ausible int(:rl)retati(ms.

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