No abstract

Usually, human-computer dialogue systems rely on ad-hoc solutions for the component performing speech turn generation, in natural language. However, integration of taskspecific and general world knowledge in order to provide a more reliable and natural interaction with humans also through more sophisticated language generation techniques becomes needed. In this paper we present performance improvements of a module simulating in first-order logic Segmented Discourse Representation Theory for language generation in dialogue. These improvements concern reductions in computational costs and enhancements in rhetorical coherence for the discourse structures obtained, and are obtained using speech-act related information for driving rhetorical relations computations.

No abstract

Ageing affects the economic and social foundations of societies at world level. Health care has to respond to the challenge that population ageing presents. Medical remote monitoring needs human operator to be assisted by means of smart information systems. Physiological and position sensors give numerous data, but speech analysis and sound classification can give interesting additional information about the patient and may help in decision-making. The entire analysis system is composed of parallel tasks: signal detection & channel selection, sound/speech classification, life sound classification and speech recognition. The multichannel sound processing allows us to localize the source of sound in the apartment and to select appropriate signal segments for analysis. Recognized key words indicative of a distress situation are extracted from sentences. Key words and classification results are sent to the medical remote monitoring application through network. An adapted speech corpus was recorded in French and used for evaluation purposes.

No abstract

No abstract

Amino-acids, peptides, and protein hydrolysates, together with their coordinating compounds, have various applications as fertilizers, nutritional supplements, additives, fillers, or active principles to produce hydrogels with therapeutic properties. Hydrogel-based patches can be adapted for drug, protein, or peptide delivery, and tissue healing and regeneration. These materials have the advantage of copying the contour of the wound surface, ensuring oxygenation, hydration, and at the same time protecting the surface from bacterial invasion. The aim of this paper is to describe the production of a new type of hydrogel based on whey protein isolates (WPI), whey protein hydrolysates (WPH), and gelatin. The hydrogels were obtained by utilizing a microwave-assisted method using gelatin, glycerol, WPI or WPH, copper sulfate, and water. WPH was obtained by enzymatic hydrolysis of whey protein isolates in the presence of bromelain. The hydrogel films obtained have been characterized by FT-IR and UV-VIS spectroscopy. The swelling degree and swelling kinetics have also been determined.

The aim of this paper is twofold: measuring the effect of discourse structure when assessing the overall opinion of a document and analyzing to what extent these effects depend on the corpus genre. Using Segmented Discourse Representation Theory as our formal framework, we propose several strategies to compute the overall rating. Our results show that discourse-based strategies lead to better scores in terms of accuracy and Pearson's correlation than state-of-the-art approaches.