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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Impact Of Language Immersion Programs On Foreign Language, Jean-Paul Chaussé Mar 2008

Impact Of Language Immersion Programs On Foreign Language, Jean-Paul Chaussé

Theses and Dissertations

Communicating with other nations in their native language is an important and necessary aspect of a successful United States’ foreign policy. Critical to this success is the ability of military personnel to communicate clearly when in contact with foreign nationals, whether in peace-time or war. The Air Force has made great strides in the past 10 years to improve its foreign language capability, particularly through its application of the Language and Area Studies Immersion (LASI) program. The LASI program has significantly improved the foreign language capability of the Air Force, specifically those with previous language scores in the mid-tier range. …


Statistical Machine Translation Of Japanese, Erik A. Chapla Mar 2007

Statistical Machine Translation Of Japanese, Erik A. Chapla

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to find ways to improve the performance of a statistical machine translation system that translates text from Japanese to English. Methods included altering the training and test data by adding a prior linguistic knowledge, altering sentence structures, and looking for better ways to statistically alter the way words align between the two languages. In addition, methods for properly segmenting words in Japanese text through statistical methods were examined. Finally, experiments were conducted on Japanese speech to produce the best text transcription of the speech. The best statistical machine translation methods implemented resulted in improvements …


Multilingual Phoneme Models For Rapid Speech Processing System Development, Eric G. Hansen Sep 2006

Multilingual Phoneme Models For Rapid Speech Processing System Development, Eric G. Hansen

Theses and Dissertations

Current speech recognition systems tend to be developed only for commercially viable languages. The resources needed for a typical speech recognition system include hundreds of hours of transcribed speech for acoustic models and 10 to 100 million words of text for language models; both of these requirements can be costly in time and money. The goal of this research is to facilitate rapid development of speech systems to new languages by using multilingual phoneme models to alleviate requirements for large amounts of transcribed speech. The Global Phone database, winch contains transcribed speech from 15 languages, is used as source data …


Speech Recognition Using The Mellin Transform, Jesse R. Hornback Mar 2006

Speech Recognition Using The Mellin Transform, Jesse R. Hornback

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to improve performance in speech recognition. Specifically, a new approach was investigating by applying an integral transform known as the Mellin transform (MT) on the output of an auditory model to improve the recognition rate of phonemes through the scale-invariance property of the Mellin transform. Scale-invariance means that as a time-domain signal is subjected to dilations, the distribution of the signal in the MT domain remains unaffected. An auditory model was used to transform speech waveforms into images representing how the brain "sees" a sound. The MT was applied and features were extracted. The …