MEANS OF SYNTACTIC COMPRESSION IN ENGLISH TEXTS ON MECHANICAL ENGINEERING AND METHODS OF THEIR TRANSLATION INTO UKRAINIAN

The article is devoted to the analysis of syntactic compression means and methods of their translation; study of frequency of syntactic compression means use and frequency of their translation methods application on the material of mechanical engineering texts. The research material is syntactic units of language selected from the mechanical engineering texts, demonstrating the use of syntactic compression, and their translation into Ukrainian. Examples were selected from the manuals on mechanical engineering, operating instructions for various devices, bilingual sites of international engineering companies such as SKF and DENSO. The results of our study showed that the most productive means of syntactic compression in the mechanical engineering texts are the infinitive (27%), gerund (18%), and adjective (16%). Less productive means of syntactic compression are ellipsis (11%), replacement (10%), syntactic reduction (9%) and nominalization (9%). A study of ways to translate English compressed structures in the mechanical engineering texts, depending on the syntactic compression means used, showed that most often the infinitive is translated by a complex sentence of the goal (65.4%), and least often – a complex sentence of cause and effect); the most frequent way of translating an adjective is a complex sentence with attribute (72.8%), the least frequent – unfolding (1.2%); gerund in these texts is most often translated by replacing parts of speech (78.7%), least often – a complex sentence of mode of action (1.1%); the most typical way of translating an ellipse is unfolding (80%), the least frequent ways of an ellipse translating are complex sentences of purpose (1.7%), time (1.7%) and admission (1.7%); nominalization is most often translated by a complex sentence of the goal (40.7%), least often – a complex sentence with attribute (1.9%); the most frequent way of translating syntactic reduction in the texts of mechanical engineering is unfolding (89.4%), the least frequent – explanatory translation (10.6%); replacement is most often translated by unfolding (75.5%), and the least often – explanatory translation (24.5%). Keywords: speech compression; syntactic compression; syntactic compression means; compressed structures; translation methods; mechanical engineering texts.

Evaluation of digital watermarking on subjective speech quality

New methods of securing the distribution of audio content have been widely deployed in the last twenty years. Their impact on perceptive quality has, however, only been seldomly the subject of recent extensive research. We review digital speech watermarking state of the art and provide subjective testing of watermarked speech samples. Latest speech watermarking techniques are listed, with their specifics and potential for further development. Their current and possible applications are evaluated. Open-source software designed to embed watermarking patterns in audio files is used to produce a set of samples that satisfies the requirements of modern speech-quality subjective assessments. The patchwork algorithm that is coded in the application is mainly considered in this analysis. Different watermark robustness levels are used, which allow determining the threshold of detection to human listeners. The subjective listening tests are conducted following ITU-T P.800 Recommendation, which precisely defines the conditions and requirements for subjective testing. Further analysis tries to determine the effects of noise and various disturbances on watermarked speech’s perceived quality. A threshold of intelligibility is estimated to allow further openings on speech compression techniques with watermarking. The impact of language or social background is evaluated through an additional experiment involving two groups of listeners. Results show significant robustness of the watermarking implementation, retaining both a reasonable net subjective audio quality and security attributes, despite mild levels of distortion and noise. Extended experiments with Chinese listeners open the door to formulate a hypothesis on perception variations with geographical and social backgrounds.

Language Transfer: Dominant Channels in Perception

The paper covers a range of issues related to the specifics of Russian language mastering by Indian students studying in English and Russian. The research is based on an integrative methodological platform that combines approaches to multilingualism formation from the standpoint of psychological linguistics, cognitive linguistics, the theory of language contacts, discourse and communication science. The research involves the techniques of psychological and semantic analyses and verbal associations, the methods of contextual analysis and comparison. The material of the paper is the data obtained from online surveys of Indian students who have been studying at universities in North Ossetia-Alania for six years (elementary and pre-intermediate levels of Russian language proficiency). The study is aimed at identifying perception channels that represent the features of foreign students cognitive style in the Russian natural environment, descripting level-by-level interfering influence of native languages and weak interference of English. Based on text fragments and lexical units, vectors and methods of interlingual interference were demonstrated, its leading types were determined, that are phonetic, phonemic, graphemic, phonemic-graphemic, morphological and lexical. The role of English as a communicative mediator is defined. The analysis done confirmed complex application of auditory, visual and kinesthetic channels at the information input, and revealed the dominance of the auditory perception channel at the information output while learning the Russian language by Indian students. The Indian students cognitive style tends to be simplified through contamination of written and oral speech, compression, abbreviations usage, intensification of associative and semantic links. Strategies for using Internet translation, imitation of mastering the Russian language, literal translation from English into Russian, strategies for the implementation of graphic, phonetic-graphic principles of writing, phonemic and grammatical reduction were identified as the basic communication strategies of Indian students learning Russian.

Effects of Using Static Methods with Contourlet Transformation on Speech Compression

Compression of speech signal is an essential field in signal processing. Speech compression is very important in today’s world, due to the limited bandwidth transmission and storage capacity. This paper explores a Contourlet transformation based methodology for the compression of the speech signal. In this methodology, the speech signal is analysed using Contourlet transformation coefficients with statistic methods as threshold values, such as Interquartile Filter (IQR), Average Absolute Deviation (AAD), Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) and standard deviation (STD), followed by the application of (Run length encoding) They are exploited for recording speech in different times (5, 30, and 120 seconds). A comparative study of performance of different transforms is made in terms of (Signal to Noise Ratio,Peak Signal to Noise Ratio,Normalized Cross-Correlation, Normalized Cross-Correlation) and the compression ratio (CR). The best stable result of implementing our algorithm for compressing speech is at level1 with AAD or MAD, adopting Matlab 2013a language.

Real Time Implementation of Voice Activity Detection based on False Acceptance Regulation

In speech compression systems, Voice Activity Detection (VAD) is frequently used to distinguish active voice from other noisy sounds. In this paper, a robust approach of VAD is presented to deal with non-stationary noisy environments. The proposed algorithm exploits adaptive thresholding technique to keep a desired False Acceptance (FA) rate. Iterative hypothesis tests, using signal energy, are implemented to discard or to accept the successive audio frames as active voice. According to the stationary property of the speech, we provide a smoothing method to obtain final VAD decisions. The main contribution of the proposed algorithm concerns its ability to automatically adjust the energy threshold according to the local noise estimator. We analyzed the proposed approach by presenting a comparison with the G.729-B via the NOIZEUS database. The VAD architecture is implemented on a Microcontroller-based system (MCU). Several tests have been conducted by performing real time acquisition via the Input/Output ports of the MCU-system.