Taxonomy of Speech Recognition Systems
Automatic voice-controlled systems have changed the way humans interact with a computer. Voice or speech recognition systems allow a user to make a hands-free request to the computer, which in turn processes the request and serves the user with appropriate responses. After years of research and developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, today voice-controlled technologies have become more efficient and are widely applied in many domains to enable and improve human-to-human and human-to-computer interactions. The state-of-the-art e-commerce applications with the help of web technologies offer interactive and user-friendly interfaces. However, there are some instances where people, especially with visual disabilities, are not able to fully experience the serviceability of such applications. A voice-controlled system embedded in a web application can enhance user experience and can provide voice as a means to control the functionality of e-commerce websites. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of speech recognition systems (SRS) and present a voice-controlled commodity purchase e-commerce application using IBM Watson speech-to-text to demonstrate its usability. The prototype can be extended to other application scenarios such as government service kiosks and enable analytics of the converted text data for scenarios such as medical diagnosis at the clinics. …

Deep Image Feature Learning With Fuzzy Rules (DIFL-FR)
The methods of extracting image features are the key to many image processing tasks. At present, the most popular method is the deep neural network which can automatically extract robust features through end-to-end training instead of hand-crafted feature extraction. However, the deep neural network currently faces many challenges: 1) its effectiveness is heavily dependent on large datasets, so the computational complexity is very high; 2) it is usually regarded as a black box model with poor interpretability. To meet the above challenges, a more interpretable and scalable feature learning method, i.e., deep image feature learning with fuzzy rules (DIFL-FR), is proposed in the paper, which combines the rule-based fuzzy modeling technique and the deep stacked learning strategy. The method progressively learns image features through a layer-by-layer manner based on fuzzy rules, so the feature learning process can be better explained by the generated rules. More importantly, the learning process of the method is only based on forward propagation without back propagation and iterative learning, which results in the high learning efficiency. In addition, the method is under the settings of unsupervised learning and can be easily extended to scenes of supervised and semi-supervised learning. Extensive experiments are conducted on image datasets of different scales. The results obviously show the effectiveness of the proposed method. …

Tea
Though statistical analyses are centered on research questions and hypotheses, current statistical analysis tools are not. Users must first translate their hypotheses into specific statistical tests and then perform API calls with functions and parameters. To do so accurately requires that users have statistical expertise. To lower this barrier to valid, replicable statistical analysis, we introduce Tea, a high-level declarative language and runtime system. In Tea, users express their study design, any parametric assumptions, and their hypotheses. Tea compiles these high-level specifications into a constraint satisfaction problem that determines the set of valid statistical tests, and then executes them to test the hypothesis. We evaluate Tea using a suite of statistical analyses drawn from popular tutorials. We show that Tea generally matches the choices of experts while automatically switching to non-parametric tests when parametric assumptions are not met. We simulate the effect of mistakes made by non-expert users and show that Tea automatically avoids both false negatives and false positives that could be produced by the application of incorrect statistical tests. …

Short Text Topic Modeling (STTM)
Analyzing short texts infers discriminative and coherent latent topics that is a critical and fundamental task since many real-world applications require semantic understanding of short texts. Traditional long text topic modeling algorithms (e.g., PLSA and LDA) based on word co-occurrences cannot solve this problem very well since only very limited word co-occurrence information is available in short texts. Therefore, short text topic modeling has already attracted much attention from the machine learning research community in recent years, which aims at overcoming the problem of sparseness in short texts. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of various short text topic modeling techniques proposed in the literature. We present three categories of methods based on Dirichlet multinomial mixture, global word co-occurrences, and self-aggregation, with example of representative approaches in each category and analysis of their performance on various tasks. We develop the first comprehensive open-source library, called STTM, for use in Java that integrates all surveyed algorithms within a unified interface, benchmark datasets, to facilitate the expansion of new methods in this research field. Finally, we evaluate these state-of-the-art methods on many real-world datasets and compare their performance against one another and versus long text topic modeling algorithm. …