In this study, we aim to improve the performance of audio source separation for monaural mixture signals. For monaural audio source separation, semisupervised nonnegative matrix factorization (SNMF) can achieve higher separation performance by employing small supervised signals. In particular, penalized SNMF (PSNMF) with orthogonality penalty is an effective method. PSNMF forces two basis matrices for target and nontarget sources to be orthogonal to each other and improves the separation accuracy. However, the conventional orthogonality penalty is based on an inner product and does not affect the estimation of the basis matrix properly because of the scale indeterminacy between the basis and activation matrices in NMF. To cope with this problem, a new PSNMF with cosine similarity between the basis matrices is proposed. The experimental comparison shows the efficacy of the proposed cosine similarity penalty in supervised audio source separation.

This study designs a low-cost portable device that functions as a coaching assistant system which can support table tennis practice. Although deep learning technology is a promising solution to realizing human activity recognition, we propose using cosine similarity in making inferences. Our experiments show that the cosine similarity based inference can be a good alternative to the deep learning based inference for the assistant system when resources are limited.

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a method for developing a chat-oriented dialog system by utilizing real human-to-human conversation examples from movie scripts and Twitter conversations. The aim of the proposed method is to build a conversational agent that can interact with users in as natural a fashion as possible, while reducing the time requirement for database design and collection. A number of the challenging design issues we faced are described, including (1) constructing an appropriate dialog corpora from raw movie scripts and Twitter data, and (2) developing an multi domain chat-oriented dialog management system which can retrieve a proper system response based on the current user query. To build a dialog corpus, we propose a unit of conversation called a tri-turn (a trigram conversation turn), as well as extraction and semantic similarity analysis techniques to help ensure that the content extracted from raw movie/drama script files forms appropriate dialog-pair (query-response) examples. The constructed dialog corpora are then utilized in a data-driven dialog management system. Here, various approaches are investigated including example-based (EBDM) and response generation using phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT). In particular, we use two EBDM: syntactic-semantic similarity retrieval and TF-IDF based cosine similarity retrieval. Experiments are conducted to compare and contrast EBDM and SMT approaches in building a chat-oriented dialog system, and we investigate a combined method that addresses the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. System performance was evaluated based on objective metrics (semantic similarity and cosine similarity) and human subjective evaluation from a small user study. Experimental results show that the proposed filtering approach effectively improve the performance. Furthermore, the results also show that by combing both EBDM and SMT approaches, we could overcome the shortcomings of each.

A technique that acquires documents in the same category with a given short text is introduced. Regarding the given text as a training document, the system marks up the most similar document, or sufficiently similar documents, from among the document domain (or entire Web). The system then adds the marked documents to the training set to learn the set, and this process is repeated until no more documents are marked. Setting a monotone increasing property to the similarity as it learns enables the system to 1) detect the correct timing so that no more documents remain to be marked and to 2) decide the threshold value that the classifier uses. In addition, under the condition that the normalization process is limited to what term weights are divided by a p-norm of the weights, the linear classifier in which training documents are indexed in a binary manner is the only instance that satisfies the monotone increasing property. The feasibility of the proposed technique was confirmed through an examination of binary similarity and using English and German documents randomly selected from the Web.