This paper presents an improved pragmatic approach to coded modulation design which provides higher coding gains especially for very noisy channels including those with Rayleigh fading. The signal constellation using four equally utilized dimensions implemented with two correlative carrier frequencies is adopted to enhance the performance of the pragmatic approach previously proposed by Viterbi et al.. The proposed scheme is shown to perform much better by analysis of system performance parameters and extensive computer simulation for practical channel conditions. The bandwidth and power efficiencies are also analyzed and discussed to provide more design flexibility for different communications environments.

A RAKE receiver accomplishing joint blind multipath diversity combining and PN code timing recovery is proposed for direct-sequence spread-spectrum signaling over a frequency-selective fading channel. In this technique, an improved known modulus adaptive algorithm is exploited to perform multipath diversity combining in the blind mode, while a modified PN code timing recovery technique based on the timing error estimator extracts the finger error signals path by path independently. Taking the advantage of inherent diversity, this modified PN code timing recovery technique can efficiently combine finger error signals to avoid the problems with the drift or flutter effects in the timing error signals, and thus provide better code tracking performance as well. Extensive computer simulation results have verified the analysis and indicated very attractive performance of the proposed technique.

This study proposes a variable selection linear regression (VSLR) adaptation framework to improve the accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR) with only limited and unlabeled adaptation data. The proposed framework can be divided into three phases. The first phase prepares multiple variable subsets by applying a ranking filter to the original regression variable set. The second phase determines the best variable subset based on a pre-determined performance evaluation criterion and computes a linear regression (LR) mapping function based on the determined subset. The third phase performs adaptation in either model or feature spaces. The three phases can select the optimal components and remove redundancies in the LR mapping function effectively and thus enable VSLR to provide satisfactory adaptation performance even with a very limited number of adaptation statistics. We formulate model space VSLR and feature space VSLR by integrating the VS techniques into the conventional LR adaptation systems. Experimental results on the Aurora-4 task show that model space VSLR and feature space VSLR, respectively, outperform standard maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR) and feature space MLLR (fMLLR) and their extensions, with notable word error rate (WER) reductions in a per-utterance unsupervised adaptation manner.

Multi-domain spoken dialogue systems with high degree of intelligence and domain extensibility have long been desired but difficult to achieve. When the user freely surfs among different topics during the dialogue, it will be very difficult for the system to control the switching of the topics and domains while keeping the dialogue consistent, and decide when and how to take the initiative. This paper presents a distributed agent architecture for multi-domain spoken dialogue systems with high domain extensibility and intelligence. Under this architecture, different spoken dialogue agents (SDA's) handling different domains can be developed independently, and then smoothly cooperate with one another to achieve the user's multiple goals, while a user interface agent (UIA) can access the correct spoken dialogue agent through a domain switching protocol, and carry over the dialogue state and history so as to keep the knowledge processed coherently across different domains.

A modified fully-digital code tracking loop is proposed in this paper for direct-sequence spread-spectrum signaling on a frequency-selective fading channel. A data-modulated channel estimator is used to cope with the time-varying Rayleigh fading effect and the data modulation effect, and extract the desired error signal from each path independently in the multipath environments. By taking advantage of the inherent diversity with the maximal ratio combining (MRC) or a proposed Even/odd maximal ratio combining (EMRC) technique, this modified code tracking loop can avoid the problem due to the drift or flutter effects of the error characteristics, and provide better performance on frequency selective fading channels. Extensive computer simulation has verified the analysis and indicated very attractive behavior of the proposed digital tracking loop.