Publications

One of the greatest challenges for an adult learning a new language is gaining the ability to distinguish and produce foreign sounds. The US Government trains 3,600 enlisted soldiers a year at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC) in languages critical to national security, most of which are...

Unsupervised feature learning methods have proven effective for classification tasks based on a single modality. We present multimodal sparse coding for learning feature representations shared across multiple modalities. The shared representations are applied to multimedia event detection (MED) and evaluated in comparison to unimodal counterparts, as well as other feature...

Competing Cognitive Radio Network (CCRN) coalesces communicator (comm) nodes and jammers to achieve maximal networking efficiency in the presence of adversarial threats. We have previously developed two contrasting approaches for CCRN based on multi-armed bandit (MAB) and Qlearning. Despite their differences, both approaches have shown to achieve optimal throughput performance...

This report summarizes the MITLL-AFRL MT, ASR and SLT systems and the experiments run using them during the 2015 IWSLT evaluation campaign. We build on the progress made last year, and additionally experimented with neural MT, unknown word processing, and system combination. We applied these techniques to translating Chinese to...

Graph fusion has emerged as a promising research area for addressing challenges associated with noisy, uncertain, multi-source data. While many ad-hoc graph fusion techniques exist in the current literature, an analytical approach for analyzing the fundamentals of the graph fusion problem is lacking. We consider the setting where we are...

A common problem in modern graph analysis is the detection of communities, an example of which is the detection of a single anomalously dense subgraph. Recent results have demonstrated a fundamental limit for this problem when using spectral analysis of modularity. In this paper, we demonstrate the implication of these...

The development of the i-vector framework for generating low dimensional representations of speech utterances has led to considerable improvements in speaker recognition performance. Although these gains have been achieved in periodic National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) evaluations, the problem of domain mismatch, where the system development data and...

This paper describes the AFRL-MITLL statistical MT systems and the improvements that were developed during the WMT15 evaluation campaign. As part of these efforts we experimented with a number of extensions to the standard phrase-based model that improve performance on the Russian to English translation task creating three submission systems...

Significant performance gains have been reported separately for speaker recognition (SR) and language recognition (LR) tasks using either DNN posteriors of sub-phonetic units or DNN feature representations, but the two techniques have not been compared on the same SR or LR task or across SR and LR tasks using the...

Previous studies have shown that, in addition to being speaker-dependent yet context-independent, lower vocal tract acoustics significantly impact the speech spectrum at mid-to-high frequencies (e.g 3-6kHz). The present work automatically estimates spectral features that exhibit acoustic properties of the lower vocal tract. Specifically aiming to capture the cyclicity property of...