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Identifying different functional regions during a brain surgery is a challenging task usually performed by highly specialized neurophysiologists. Progress in this field may be used to improve in situ brain navigation and will serve as an important building block to minimize the number of animals in preclinical brain research required by properly positioning implants intraoperatively. The study at hand aims to correlate recorded extracellular signals with the volume of origin by deep learning methods. Our work establishes connections between the position in the brain and recorded high-density neural signals. This was achieved by evaluating the performance of BLSTM, BGRU, QRNN and CNN neural network architectures on multisite electrophysiological data sets. All networks were able to successfully distinguish cortical and thalamic brain regions according to their respective neural signals. The BGRU provides the best results with an accuracy of 88.6 % and demonstrates that this classification task might be solved in higher detail while minimizing complex preprocessing steps.
We present a comprehensive analysis of the neural audio-visual synchrony evaluation tool SyncNet. We assess the agreement of SyncNet scores vis-a-vis human perception and whether we can use these as a reliable metric for evaluating audio-visual lip-synchrony in generation tasks with no ground truth reference audio-video pair. We further look into the underlying elements in audio and video which vitally affect synchrony using interpretable explanations from SyncNet predictions and analyse its susceptibility by introducing adversarial noise. SyncNet has been used in numerous papers on visually-grounded text-to-speech for scenarios such as dubbing. We focus on this scenario which features many local asynchronies (something that SyncNet isn’t made for).
We introduce the Merkel Podcast Corpus, an audio-visual-text corpus in German collected from 16 years of (almost) weekly Internet podcasts of former German chancellor Angela Merkel. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first single speaker corpus in the German language consisting of audio, visual and text modalities of comparable size and temporal extent. We describe the methods used with which we have collected and edited the data which involves downloading the videos, transcripts and other metadata, forced alignment, performing active speaker recognition and face detection to finally curate the single speaker dataset consisting of utterances spoken by Angela Merkel. The proposed pipeline is general and can be used to curate other datasets of similar nature, such as talk show contents. Through various statistical analyses and applications of the dataset in talking face generation and TTS, we show the utility of the dataset. We argue that it is a valuable contribution to the research community, in particular, due to its realistic and challenging material at the boundary between prepared and spontaneous speech.
Accepted at LREC 2022
Ellipses denote the omission of one or more grammatically necessary phrases. In this paper, we will demonstrate how to identify such ellipses as a rhythmical pattern in modern and postmodern free verse poetry by using data from lyrikline which contain the corresponding audio recording of each poem as spoken by the original author. We present a feature engineering approach based on literary analysis as well as a neural networks based approach for the identification of ellipses within the lines of a poem. A contrast class to the ellipsis is defined from poems consisting of complete and correct sentences. The feature-based approach used features derived from a parser such as verb, comma, and sentence ending punctuation. The classifier of neural networks is trained on the line level to integrate the textual information, the spoken recitation, and the pause information between lines, and to integrate information across the lines within the poem. A statistic analysis of poet's gender showed that 65% of all elliptical poems were written by female poets. The best results, calculated by the weighted F-measure, for the classification of ellipsis with the contrast class is 0.94 with the neural networks based approach. The best results for classification of elliptical lines is 0.62 with the feature-based approach.
A large proportion of (post)-modern poetry contains no or hardly any punctuation. In our contribution, we will investigate how well punctuation information can be recovered for postmodern poetry based on the information contained in the text and speech of free verse poems. We use the world's largest corpus of spoken (post-)modern poetry from our partner lyrikline which contains the corresponding audio recording of each poem as spoken by the original author and features translations for many of the poems. We identify lines that contain a phrase break in the middle of the poetic line, which may already be helpful for philological analysis on one hand, and identify the position of the break in the line on the other hand. We select those poetic lines that contain one or more punctuation characters that typically indicate a phrase break in poetry (.,;:!?/) somewhere in the middle (rather than only at the end of the line) as our target class. We train a neural network (bidirectional recurrent neural network (RNN) based on gated recurrent units (GRU) with attention) that combines audio and textual features to identify the punctuation with the goal of applying it to reconstruct them within a corpus of unpunctuated poems. Our results clearly indicate that speech is helpful for recovering the constituency structure of post-modern poetry that is partially obfuscated by missing punctuation.
Dubbing, i.e., the lip-synchronous translation and revoicing of audio-visual media into a target language from a different source language, is essential for the full-fledged reception of foreign audio-visual media, be it movies, instructional videos or short social media clips. In this paper, we objectify influences on the ‘dubbability’ of translations, i.e., how well a translation would be synchronously revoiceable to the lips on screen. We explore the value of traditional heuristics used in evaluating the qualitative aspects, in particular matching bilabial consonants and the jaw opening while producing vowels, and control for quantity, i.e., that translations are similar to the source in length. We perform an ablation study using an adversarial neural classifier which is trained to differentiate “true” dubbing translations from machine translations. While we are able to confirm the value of matching lip closure in dubbing, we find that the opening angle of the jaw as determined by the realized vowel may be less relevant than frequently considered in audio-visual translation.
This contribution focuses on structural similarities between tonality and cadences in music on the one hand, and rhythmical patterns in poetic languages respectively poetry on the other hand.
We investigate two exemplary rhythmical patterns in modern and postmodern poetry to detect these tonality-like features in poetic language: The Parlando and the Variable Foot. German poems
readout from the original poets are collected from the webpage of our partner lyrikline. We compared these rhythmical features with tonality rules, explained in two important theoretical volumes: The Generative Theory of Tonal Music and the Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse. Using both volumes, we focused on a certain combination of four different features: The grouping
structure, the metrical structure, the time-span-variation and the prolongation, in order to detect the two important rhythmical patterns which use tonality-like features in poetic language (Parlando and Variable Foot). Different features including pause and parser information are used in this classification process. The best classification result, calculated by the f-measure, for
Parlando and Variable Foot is 0.69.
We show how to classify the phrasing of readout poems with the help of machine learning algorithms that use manually engineered features or automatically learn representations. We investigate modern and postmodern poems from the webpage lyrikline, and focus on two exemplary rhythmical patterns in order to detect the rhythmic phrasing: The Parlando and the Variable Foot. These rhythmical patterns have been compared by using two important theoretical works: The Generative Theory of Tonal Music and the Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse. Using both, we focus on a combination of four different features: The grouping structure, the metrical structure, the time-span-variation, and the prolongation in order to detect the rhythmic phrasing in the two rhythmical types. We use manually engineered features based on text-speech alignment and parsing for classification. We also train a neural network to learn its own representation based on text, speech and audio during pauses. The neural network outperforms manual feature engineering, reaching an f-measure of 0.85.
This work aims to discern the poetics of concrete poetry by using a corpus-based classification focusing on the two most important techniques used within concrete poetry: semantic decomposition and syntactic permutation. We demonstrate how to identify concrete poetry in modern and postmodern free verse. A class contrasting to concrete poetry is defined on the basis of poems with complete and correct sentences. We used the data from lyrikline, which contain both the written as well as the spoken form of poems as read by the original author. We explored two approaches for the identification of concrete poetry. The first is based on the definition of concrete poetry in literary theory by the extraction of various types of features derived from a parser, such as verb, noun, comma, sentence ending, conjunction, and asemantic material. The second is a neural network-based approach, which is theoretically less informed by human insight, as it does not have access to features established by scholars. This approach used the following inputs: textual information and the spoken recitation of poetic lines as well as information about pauses between lines. The results based on the neural network are more accurate than the feature-based approach. The best results, calculated by the weighted F-measure, for the classification of concrete poetry vis-à-vis the contrasting class is 0.96