Naturalness

About: Naturalness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1305 publications have been published within this topic receiving 31737 citations.

Naturalness in an effective field theory for neutron star matter

Abstract: High density hadronic matter is studied in a generalized relativistic multi-baryon Lagrangian density mean field approach which contains nonlinear couplings of the σ, ω, ϱ fields. We compare the predictions of our model with estimates obtained within a phenomenological naive dimensional analysis based on the naturalness of the coefficients of the theory. Upon adjusting the model parameters to describe bulk static properties of ordinary nuclear matter, we show that our approach represents a natural modelling of nuclear matter under the extreme conditions of density as the ones found in the interior of neutron stars. Moreover, we show that naturalness play a major role in effective field theory and, in combination with experiment, could represent a relevant criterium to select a model among others in the description of global static properties of neutron stars.

What sewage sludge is and conflicts in Swedish circular economy policymaking

Abstract: ABSTRACT Recycling nutrients from renewable sources, like sewage sludge, has been promoted as a step towards a circular economy by decreasing extraction and dependency on inorganic fertilizers. Implementation, however, is often controversial. In 2018, a Swedish governmental inquiry was commissioned to propose a complete ban on land application of sewage sludge to reduce soil pollution and increase phosphorus recovery. In 2020, the inquiry suggested two pathways, one to ban all land application, and one where agricultural land use should continuously be allowed. This paper is based on interviews with experts tied to the inquiry where they reference to sewage sludge, related objects, and future management. The inquiry’s inability to propose a coherent suggestion is analysed inspired by the concept of multiple ontology. Several ontological versions of sewage sludge emerge that unveil tensions between concepts of danger and cleanliness, pollution and naturalness, often captured in previous studies of waste. Some versions of sewage sludge conflict, which can explain the difficulty to establish an ontologically singular knowledge base for a transformation of sewage sludge from waste to resource. Though most of the experts agree that circular economy and nutrient recycling are good things, policymaking is caught in an ontological conundrum.

Trade-Off between Task Accuracy, Task Completion Time and Naturalness for Direct Object Manipulation in Virtual Reality

Abstract: Virtual reality devices are used for several application domains, such as medicine, entertainment, marketing and training. A handheld controller is the common interaction method for direct object manipulation in virtual reality environments. Using hands would be a straightforward way to directly manipulate objects in the virtual environment if hand-tracking technology were reliable enough. In recent comparison studies, hand-based systems compared unfavorably against the handheld controllers in task completion times and accuracy. In our controlled study, we compare these two interaction techniques with a new hybrid interaction technique which combines the controller tracking with hand gestures for a rigid object manipulation task. The results demonstrate that the hybrid interaction technique is the most preferred because it is intuitive, easy to use, fast, reliable and it provides haptic feedback resembling the real-world object grab. This suggests that there is a trade-off between naturalness, task accuracy and task completion time when using these direct manipulation interaction techniques, and participants prefer to use interaction techniques that provide a balance between these three factors.

Improving Naturalness of HMM-Based TTS Trained with Limited Data by Temporal Decomposition

Abstract: The most important advantage of HMM-based TTS is its highly intelligible. However, speech synthesized by HMM-based TTS is muffled and far from natural, especially under limited data conditions, which is mainly caused by its over-smoothness. Therefore, the motivation for this paper is to improve the naturalness of HMM-based TTS trained under limited data conditions while preserving its intelligibility. To achieve this motivation, a hybrid TTS between HMM-based TTS and the modified restricted Temporal Decomposition (MRTD), named HTD in this paper, was proposed. Here, TD is an interpolation model of decomposing a spectral or prosodic sequence of speech into sparse event targets and dynamic event functions, and MRTD is one simplified version of TD. With a determination of event functions close to the concept of co-articulation in speech, MRTD can synthesize smooth speech and the smoothness in synthesized speech can be adjusted by manipulating event targets of MRTD. Previous studies have also found that event functions of MRTD can represent linguistic information of speech, which is important to perceive speech intelligibility, while sparse event targets can convey the non-linguistics information, which is important to perceive the naturalness of speech. Therefore, prosodic trajectories and MRTD event functions of the spectral trajectory generated by HMM-based TTS were kept unchanged to preserve the high and stable intelligibility of HMM-based TTS. Whereas MRTD event targets of the spectral trajectory generated by HMM-based TTS were rendered with an original speech database to enhance the naturalness of synthesized speech. Experimental results with small Vietnamese datasets revealed that the proposed HTD was equivalent to HMM-based TTS in terms of intelligibility but was superior to it in terms of naturalness. Further discussions show that HTD had a small footprint. Therefore, the proposed HTD showed its strong efficiency under limited data conditions. key words: text to speech, HMM-based TTS, hybrid TTS, limited data, temporal decomposition