"Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> writes:> Scott Seidman wrote: > > "Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in news:1156521775.946503.254890@ > > 74g2000cwt.googlegroups.com: > > > > > I have never agreed to item 3, which I can only interpret to > > > state that there is some characteristic unique to human > > > words, as opposed to both non-anthropogenic sounds or > > > anthropogenic sounds that are not words. > > > > There is huge research along such lines in the language area. Richard > > Aslin and Elissa Newport spring to mind as possible search terms. > > Is their test(s) able to include the tongue clicks of the Namib > bushmen? > And distinguish that from a six-year old clicking and singing to > herself > in a make-believe language while playing in the garden? Does their > test(s) distiguish between human speech and a parrot uttering the same > phrase? Does their test(s) separate human sound from synthesized > computer voices? > > The claim that a technique classifies something as anthropogenic, as > opposed to parrots or computers, and word, as opposed to humming > or make-believe languages, is pretty bold.I thought I understood your view point but I can't see how you read this claim from: "the area of the detection of one particular target word and/or sound in the background of all other possible words or any other realistic sounds." You've lost me. Tony
Post-doc in Acoustic Event Detection (US citizens only)
Started by ●August 24, 2006
Reply by ●August 25, 20062006-08-25
Reply by ●August 25, 20062006-08-25
Scott Seidman wrote:> "Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in news:1156522496.169055.197210 > @i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com: > >> I don't agree with such views. >> >> In my experience, literate people -- even laymen what my own >> field of work is concerned -- are actually able to comprehend >> written text. The term "all possible" has a very definite meaning: >> It means that a technique covers "all possible" variations of >> whatever, and in that sense, the technique is perfect. Pepole >> tend to understand such claims. What's more, they are able >> to review test results and expect the method in question to >> actually cover "all possible" situations. >> >> Stay clear of projects where such claims are made. Somebody >> in the funding institutions will, some day, start asking questions >> why the explicitly stated goals are not met. >> >> Rune >> > > > I'm merely suggesting that in documents like this, you really don't know > what the real claims are simply by reading the abstract. If you could, > then journals would consist of a stack of abstracts.An abstract may reasonably fail to fully inform, but it must never misinform. The fact that we so often accept being misinformed without objection is sad evidence of of the extent to which "you know what I mean" has become ingrained in our communications. Jerry -- Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get. �����������������������������������������������������������������������
Reply by ●August 25, 20062006-08-25
Rune Allnor wrote:> > For some reason, I have noted that quite a few people who have > gained extreme levels of skills in some subject tend to regard > other people who have not gained the same levels in general, > in the same subjects in particular, as somehow "inferior" or > even all out "stupid". > > I don't agree with such views. >Rune, Unfortunately, the "ignorant" is not just the characteristic of the educational level, but rather the type of the personality. Like many people are still babies no matter how many years old they are, so is the moron asking about the "phase shift" will always be the moron. The good question contains 80% of the answer, and it should not be something like "will you please do my classwork for me". VLV
Reply by ●August 25, 20062006-08-25
If they get funding, most futilely stupid projects will get worked on. Chip "Jerry Avins" <jya@ieee.org> wrote in message >> This has to be a hoax.> > Don't bet the farm on that. It might be the work of an exceedingly stupid > person or group. There are some who uncritically believe that technology > can accomplish anything.-- Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
Reply by ●August 25, 20062006-08-25
tony.nospam@nospam.tonyRobinson.com wrote:> "Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> writes: > > > Scott Seidman wrote: > > > "Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in news:1156521775.946503.254890@ > > > 74g2000cwt.googlegroups.com: > > > > > > > I have never agreed to item 3, which I can only interpret to > > > > state that there is some characteristic unique to human > > > > words, as opposed to both non-anthropogenic sounds or > > > > anthropogenic sounds that are not words. > > > > > > There is huge research along such lines in the language area. Richard > > > Aslin and Elissa Newport spring to mind as possible search terms. > > > > Is their test(s) able to include the tongue clicks of the Namib > > bushmen? > > And distinguish that from a six-year old clicking and singing to > > herself > > in a make-believe language while playing in the garden? Does their > > test(s) distiguish between human speech and a parrot uttering the same > > phrase? Does their test(s) separate human sound from synthesized > > computer voices? > > > > The claim that a technique classifies something as anthropogenic, as > > opposed to parrots or computers, and word, as opposed to humming > > or make-believe languages, is pretty bold. > > I thought I understood your view point but I can't see how you read this > claim from: > > "the area of the detection of one particular target word and/or sound in > the background of all other possible words or any other realistic sounds." > > You've lost me.Sadly to say, you just confirmed my wildest prejudices against whoever were responible for the ad, as they flashed through my mind when I wrote my first post in this thread. So let's get over this once more, with some paraphrasing and lots of spoon feeding: - Does the word "ambiguity" mean anything to you? - Can any of my examples above be "ambiguous" in one way or another with respect to your stated scope? - Could a contract of work, either between a client and an institution, or between institution and employee possibly have any legal implications? - Could it be that people tend to react negatively when somebody says "I wrote that contract to get your $$ but have never had any intention to acually deliver what we agreed on"? - Alternatively, "Any competent person knows straight away that this contract has nothing to do with reality, so let's spend the $$ doing something fun instead"? - Do you find it surprising that professionals react very badly to work under the above conditions and constraints? You've lost me. Rune
Reply by ●August 26, 20062006-08-26
Rune Allnor wrote: ...> Sadly to say, you just confirmed my wildest prejudices against > whoever were responible for the ad, as they flashed through my > mind when I wrote my first post in this thread. ...It's a language thing. Back before transistors, many companies produced receiving tubes and published "manuals", lists of pin-outs and specifications of the tubes they made. Since RCA produced almost every type, the RCA tube manual was a complete reference. Other companies produced only a subset, and their manuals weren't worth carting around. Then Sylvania got the good idea to publish a complete manual that included all popular types whether made by Sylvania or not. A colleague told me that Sylvania only marketed tubes made by others, manufacturing none. He cited as evidence the legend at the bottom of each page in the manual: "All tubes in this manual are not made by Sylvania." The semi literacy of the academic and business world is not new. Jerry -- Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get. �����������������������������������������������������������������������
Reply by ●August 26, 20062006-08-26
Rune Allnor wrote: ... > Sadly to say, you just confirmed my wildest prejudices against > whoever were responible for the ad, as they flashed through my > mind when I wrote my first post in this thread. ... It's a language thing. Back before transistors, many companies produced receiving tubes and published "manuals", lists of pin-outs and specifications of the tubes they made. Since RCA produced almost every type, the RCA tube manual was a complete reference. Other companies produced only a subset, and their manuals weren't worth carting around. Then Sylvania got the good idea to publish a complete manual that included all popular types whether made by Sylvania or not. A colleague told me that Sylvania merely marketed tubes made by others, manufacturing none. He cited as evidence the legend at the bottom of each page in the manual: "All tubes in this manual are not made by Sylvania." The semi literacy of the academic and business world is not new. Jerry -- Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get. �����������������������������������������������������������������������
Reply by ●August 26, 20062006-08-26
Jerry Avins wrote:> Scott Seidman wrote: > > "Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in news:1156522496.169055.197210 > > @i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com: > > > >> I don't agree with such views. > >> > >> In my experience, literate people -- even laymen what my own > >> field of work is concerned -- are actually able to comprehend > >> written text. The term "all possible" has a very definite meaning: > >> It means that a technique covers "all possible" variations of > >> whatever, and in that sense, the technique is perfect. Pepole > >> tend to understand such claims. What's more, they are able > >> to review test results and expect the method in question to > >> actually cover "all possible" situations. > >> > >> Stay clear of projects where such claims are made. Somebody > >> in the funding institutions will, some day, start asking questions > >> why the explicitly stated goals are not met. > >> > >> Rune > >> > > > > > > I'm merely suggesting that in documents like this, you really don't know > > what the real claims are simply by reading the abstract. If you could, > > then journals would consist of a stack of abstracts. > > An abstract may reasonably fail to fully inform, but it must never > misinform.I am guessing now -- I can't read the ad's author's mind so I don't know what he or she intended to say -- but it might have been better to write something like "match recorded speach contaminated by noise to a multilingual database" [*]. It might cover the bases, and if it does, it would let any serious applicant see that the author knows his business. It would also cover the institution for glitches: A "multilingual database" has a finite extent, depending to languages of interest and available resources in general. One miss may be explained by whatever target not being covered by the database. Which is not at all an unlikely occurence. "All possible words" leaves no such room for error, opening for all sorts of onslaughts by a customer, should a miss ever occur. I still can't make any sort of sense of this ad. Rune [*] Note the complete rephrasing of the sentence originally in the ad: "the detection of one particular target word and/or sound in the background of all other possible words or any other realistic sounds." This is not a one-word glitch, it has to be a deliberate phrasing of the original ad, making it even less sensible.
Reply by ●August 26, 20062006-08-26
"Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> writes:> tony.nospam@nospam.tonyRobinson.com wrote: > > "Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> writes: > > > > > Scott Seidman wrote: > > > > "Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in news:1156521775.946503.254890@ > > > > 74g2000cwt.googlegroups.com: > > > > > > > > > I have never agreed to item 3, which I can only interpret to > > > > > state that there is some characteristic unique to human > > > > > words, as opposed to both non-anthropogenic sounds or > > > > > anthropogenic sounds that are not words.[ examples deleted ]> > > > You've lost me. > > Sadly to say, you just confirmed my wildest prejudices against > whoever were responible for the ad, as they flashed through my > mind when I wrote my first post in this thread.I think your prejudices are getting in the way, we're discussing the meaning of a job ad.> - Can any of my examples above be "ambiguous" in one > way or another with respect to your stated scope?I don't see how your examples are relevant to the stated scope. You think the job ad claims "that there is some characteristic unique to human words, as opposed to both non-anthropogenic sounds or anthropogenic sounds that are not words." I don't. So I think your examples are irrelevant - as I said, you've lost me. As for the rest, we are discussing a job ad, not a work contract.> You've lost me.I think that's because I'm discussing the meaning of a job ad and you're discussing a time in your life when you had some very bad experiences. Tony
Reply by ●August 26, 20062006-08-26
"Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> writes:> I am guessing now -- I can't read the ad's author's mind so I don't > know what he or she intended to say -- but it might have been better > to write something like "match recorded speach contaminated by > noise to a multilingual database" [*]. It might cover the bases, and if > > it does, it would let any serious applicant see that the author knows > his business. It would also cover the institution for glitches: > A "multilingual database" has a finite extent, depending to languages > of interest and available resources in general. One miss may be > explained by whatever target not being covered by the database. > Which is not at all an unlikely occurence. > > "All possible words" leaves no such room for error, opening for > all sorts of onslaughts by a customer, should a miss ever occur.So your problem is one of coverage? I see no claim that the target has to occur in any database. Just to clarify, this is what we are talking about "the detection of one particular target word and/or sound in the background of all other possible words or any other realistic sounds." Let's set this up as a conventional pattern matching problem. We have a unknown pattern, A, and a database of previously seen patterns. We have a function that returns a score between A and every item in the database. Are you comfortable with this framework? We'll represent all patterns as digital waveforms with sufficient resolution and sampling frequency to reasonably represent any sound. Are we okay to this point or do you want to argue that you can't represent every possible sound in such a digital format? Now we populate our database with sounds, it might be a parrot saying "I know what Ambiguous means!", a computer synthesising "Usenet ranting is a waste of time" or anything else. The patterns can be any sound which convers all possible words. Are you okay with this or would you like to argue that you'll need an infinite database to store all possible words? We run our matching algorithm, it comes up with a result, perhaps it's good, perhaps not. Are you happy with this or do you expect perfect detection? We now degrade the database by embedding the patterns in other patterns. No doubt the accuracy will get worse. Do you have a problem with that? Sure, the difficulty of the problem depends on the signal to noise ratio in the database, as it's unspecified you could argue that the task is impossible - do you want to do that? My interpretation of the job ad is to build a better pattern matching algorithm so that you can find one sound in the background of other sounds. Do we agree? You've clearly got a problem matching one sound against all other possible sounds based on your past experience, I just don't see how that relates to this job ad. Tony
