Kota Hidaka

A New Multimedia Content Skimming Technique at Arbitrary User-Set Rate Based on Automatic Speech Emphasis Extraction

This article proposes a new technique for skimming multimedia content such as video mail, audio/visual data in blog sites, and other consumer-generated media. The proposed method, which is based on the automatic extraction of emphasized speech, locates emphasized portions of speech with high accuracy by using prosodic parameters such as pitch, power, and speaking rate. As the method does not employ any speech recognition technique, it enables a highly robust estimation in noisy environments. To extract emphasized portions of speech, the method introduces a metric, “degree of emphasis,” which indicates the degree of emphasis of each speech segment. Given an article, the method computes the degree of emphasis for each speech segment in it. When a user requests a skimming of the articles content, the method refers to the user-specified “skimming rate” to collect the emphasized segments. Preference experiments were performed in which participants were asked to select either the skimmed contents created by our method or those created using a fixed interval approach. The preference rate of our method was about 80%, which suggests that the proposed method can generate proper content skimming.

A New Multimedia Content Skimming Method Based on Speech Emphasis Extraction and Its Application to Content Variations

We propose Choco-Para, a multimedia content skimming technique; its application to a variety of content types is described. Based on automatic speech emphasis extraction, Choco-Para extracts speech attributes, prosodic parameters such as pitch, power, and speaking rate, and uses the data to estimate the degree of emphasis of each spoken phrase. By computing the degree of the emphasis curve, Choco-Para can generate a skimmed edition at an arbitrary skimming rate by selecting emphasized speech portions via dynamic threshold logic. Choco-Para uses three types of prosodic parameters and both short term and long term deviation. Experiments assess the contributions of each prosodic parameter and deviation type. They show that estimation accuracy is optimized by using both short and long term deviation with regard to pitch, power, and speaking rate. The results confirm that Choco-Para supports a wide variety of multimedia content

Chat-robot based web content presentation interface and its evaluation

Our goal is an interface that allows novice users to browse and enjoy Web contents as easily as they can watch TV. Given this goal, Web page contents should be converted into fully-animated TV-like audio/visual contents, taking users mental situation into consideration. Moreover, this paper focuses on generating adaptive Web page presentation according to the emotional parameters. To get the users interest and attention, we utilize two robots which can speak. In order to develop conversions that take account of the users mental situation, we performed two step surveys. First, the emotional impressions of primitive audio/visual effects were investigated. Second, the effect of the combinations of robot and primitive effects was investigated. The first experiment yielded a situation composition grammar; given an emotional situation, the appropriate audio/visual effects can be selected. The second experiment suggested that presentation media components exhibit mutual interaction. We implemented a prototype and subjectively evaluated it. The results confirm the effectiveness and validity of our proposal.