Browsing by Author "Lopes, Carla"
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- Association between living setting and malnutrition among older adults: The PEN-3S studyPublication . Madeira, Teresa; Peixoto-Plácido, Catarina; Sousa-Santos, Nuno; Santos, Osvaldo; Costa, Joana; Alarcão, Violeta; Nicola, Paulo Jorge; Severo, Milton; Lopes, Carla; Clara, João GorjãoObjectives: Malnutrition is frequent among older adults, especially those living in nursing homes, but the association between residential setting and nutritional status is controversial. The aim of this study was to examine the association between living setting (nursing home versus community) and malnutrition while adjusting for demographic, socioeconomic, health-related, and psychosocial factors. Methods: This cross-sectional study included a randomly selected representative sample of Portuguese adults ≥65 y of age. Interviewers collected data regarding demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, nutritional status, physical activity, energy intake, cognitive function, self-reported general health, functional status, symptoms of depression, and loneliness. Logistic regression models were used to estimate the association between residential setting and malnutrition. Results: Participants were 1186 nursing home residents (72.8% women, 49.2% ≥85 y of age) and 1120 community dwellers (49% women, 21.3% ≥85 y of age). Following Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA®) criteria, 29.6% of nursing home residents and 14.1% of community dwellers were at risk of malnutrition, whereas 2.3% and 0.3%, respectively, were malnourished. The living setting was not significantly associated with malnutrition after adjusting for functional status, symptoms of depression, and feelings of loneliness (odds ratio, 1.03; 95% confidence interval, 0.67–1.58). Conclusions: Risk of malnutrition and malnutrition are more prevalent among nursing home residents than community dwellers. Physical (functional status) and mental health (symptoms of depression and loneliness) seems more relevant to nutritional status than residential setting by itself. These findings should be taken into account when designing public health policies to tackle malnutrition among older adults.
- Automatic Evaluation of Children Reading Aloud on Sentences and PseudowordsPublication . Proença, Jorge; Lopes, Carla; Tjalve, Michael; Stolcke, Andreas; Candeias, Sara; Perdigão, FernandoReading aloud performance in children is typically assessed by teachers on an individual basis, manually marking reading time and incorrectly read words. A computational tool that assists with recording reading tasks, automatically analyzing them and providing performance metrics could be a significant help. Towards that goal, this work presents an approach to automatically predicting the overall reading aloud ability of primary school children (6-10 years old), based on the reading of sentences and pseudowords. The opinions of primary school teachers were gathered as ground truth of performance, who provided 0-5 scores closely related to the expectations at the end of each grade. To predict these scores automatically, features based on reading speed and number of disfluencies were extracted, after an automatic disfluency detection. Various regression models were trained, with Gaussian process regression giving best results for automatic features. Feature selection from both sentence and pseudoword reading tasks gave the closest predictions, with a correlation of 0.944. Compared to the use of manual annotation with the best correlation being 0.952, automatic annotation was only 0.8% worse. Furthermore, the error rate of predicted scores relative to ground truth was found to be smaller than the deviation of evaluators’ opinion per child.
- Automatic evaluation of reading aloud performance in childrenPublication . Proença, Jorge; Lopes, Carla, Alexandra Calado Lopes; Tjalve, Michael; Stolcke, Andreas; Candeias, Sara; Perdigão, FernandoEvaluating children’s reading aloud proficiency is typically a task done by teachers on an individual ba sis, where reading time and wrong words are marked manually. A computational tool that assists with recording reading tasks, automatically analyzing them and outputting performance related metrics could be a significant help to teachers. Working towards that goal, this work presents an approach to automat ically predict the overall reading aloud ability of primary school children by employing automatic speech processing methods. Reading tasks were designed focused on sentences and pseudowords, so as to obtain complementary information from the two distinct assignments. A dataset was collected with recordings of 284 children aged 6–10 years reading in native European Portuguese. The most common disfluencies identified include intra-word pauses, phonetic extensions, false starts, repetitions, and mispronunciations. To automatically detect reading disfluencies, we first target extra events by employing task-specific lat tices for decoding that allow syllable-based false starts as well as repetitions of words and sequences of words. Then, mispronunciations are detected based on the log likelihood ratio between the recognized and target words. The opinions of primary school teachers were gathered as ground truth of overall read ing aloud performance, who provided 0–5 scores closely related to the expected performance at the end of each grade. To predict these scores, various features were extracted by automatic annotation and re gression models were trained. Gaussian process regression proved to be the most successful approach. Feature selection from both sentence and pseudoword tasks give the closest predictions, with a correla tion of 0.944 compared to the teachers’ grading. Compared to the use of manual annotation, where the best models obtained give a correlation of 0.949, there was a relative decrease of only 0.5% for using automatic annotations to extract features. The error rate of predicted scores relative to ground truth also proved to be smaller than the deviation of evaluators’ opinion per child.
- Broad phonetic class definition driven by phone confusionsPublication . Lopes, Carla; Perdigão, FernandoIntermediate representations between the speech signal and phones may be used to improve discrimination among phones that are often confused. These representations are usually found according to broad phonetic classes, which are defined by a phonetician. This article proposes an alternative data-driven method to generate these classes. Phone confusion information from the analysis of the output of a phone recognition system is used to find clusters at high risk of mutual confusion. A metric is defined to compute the distance between phones. The results, using TIMIT data, show that the proposed confusion-driven phone clustering method is an attractive alternative to the approaches based on human knowledge. A hierarchical classification structure to improve phone recognition is also proposed using a discriminative weight training method. Experiments show improvements in phone recognition on the TIMIT database compared to a baseline system.
- Detection of Mispronunciations and Disfluencies in Children Reading AloudPublication . Proença, Jorge; Lopes, Carla; Tjalve, Michael; Stolcke, Andreas; Candeias, Sara; Perdigão, FernandoTo automatically evaluate the performance of children reading aloud or to follow a child’s reading in reading tutor applications, different types of reading disfluencies and mispronunciations must be accounted for. In this work, we aim to detect most of these disfluencies in sentence and pseudoword reading. Detecting incorrectly pronounced words, and quantifying the quality of word pronunciations, is arguably the hardest task. We approach the challenge as a two-step process. First, a segmentation using task-specific lattices is performed, while detecting repetitions and false starts and providing candidate segments for words. Then, candidates are classified as mispronounced or not, using multiple features derived from likelihood ratios based on phone decoding and forced alignment, as well as additional meta-information about the word. Several classifiers were explored (linear fit, neural networks, support vector machines) and trained after a feature selection stage to avoid overfitting. Improved results are obtained using feature combination compared to using only the log likelihood ratio of the reference word (22% versus 27% miss rate at constant 5% false alarm rate).
- Geriatric Assessment of the Portuguese Population Aged 65 and Over Living in the Community: The PEN-3S StudyPublication . Madeira, Teresa; Peixoto-Plácido, Catarina; Sousa Santos, Nuno; Santos, Osvaldo; Alarcão, Violeta; Nicola, Paulo Jorge; Lopes, Carla; Clara, João GorjãoIntroduction: As populations live longer, they also aim to live better. A crucial step for this is to improve the understanding about older adults' physical and psychological health. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to characterise the Portuguese population over-65 regarding nutritional status, cognitive function, functional status, symptoms of depression, and loneliness, by sex and age groups. Material and Methods: Cross-sectional study including a nationally representative sample of community-dwelling adults aged 65 and over. Trained interviewers collected data face-to-face on demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, health status, nutritional status, cognitive function, functional status for activities of daily living, symptoms of depression, and loneliness feelings. Complex sample procedures were used in the statistical analysis. Results: Overall, 1120 community-dwellers (49.0% women, 21.3% aged ≥ 85) participated in the study. The estimated prevalence of risk of malnutrition was 16.4% (95% confidence interval: 13.3 - 19.9), while 17.7% (95% confidence interval: 12.8 - 23.9) were cognitively impaired, and 28.5% (95% confidence interval: 23.7 - 33.8) presented limitations to perform daily living activities. Moreover, 23.5% (95% confidence interval: 19.7 - 27.7) presented symptoms of depression and 13.6% (95% confidence interval: 10.6 - 17.1) reported loneliness feelings. These conditions were more prevalent among women, and generally more frequent in the oldest individuals (≥ 85). Discussion: Risk of malnutrition, cognitive impairment, functional limitations, depression and loneliness were moderately frequent, which may justify screening and preventive actions at a community level. Conclusion: This study contributed to a national characterisation of the health of older adults, that may inform policies and interventions targeted at the needs of the Portuguese aging population.
- A hierarchical broad-class classification to enhance phoneme recognitionPublication . Lopes, Carla, Alexandra Calado Lopes; Perdigão, FernandoIn this paper a hierarchical classification of different levels of phonetic information is proposed in order to improve phone recognition. In this paradigm several intermediate classifiers give posterior probability predictions for broad phonetic classes, achieving phone detail in the last layer. Class membership probabilities are weighted and combined in order to get a more robust phoneme prediction. A method for finding the best set of weights is also proposed based on discriminative training in a hybrid MLP/HMM system. Experiments show that the use of broad-class information enhances phone recognition. Relative improvements of 8% in Correctness and 5% in Accuracy were achieved in phoneme recognition on the TIMIT database compared to a baseline system.
- The LetsRead Corpus of Portuguese children reading aloud for performance evaluationPublication . Proença, Jorge; Celorico, Dirce; Candeias, Sara; Lopes, Carla; Perdigão, FernandoThis paper introduces the LetsRead Corpus of European Portuguese read speech from 6 to 10 years old children. The motivation for the creation of this corpus stems from the inexistence of databases with recordings of reading tasks of Portuguese children with different performance levels and including all the common reading aloud disfluencies. It is also essential to develop techniques to fulfill the main objective of the LetsRead project: to automatically evaluate the reading performance of children through the analysis of reading tasks. The collected data amounts to 20 hours of speech from 284 children from private and public Portuguese schools, with each child carrying out two tasks: reading sentences and reading a list of pseudowords, both with varying levels of difficulty throughout the school grades. In this paper, the design of the reading tasks presented to children is described, as well as the collection procedure. Manually annotated data is analyzed according to disfluencies and reading performance. The considered word difficulty parameter is also confirmed to be suitable for the pseudoword reading tasks.
- Prospetiva 2035 - Três Cenários para o Futuro de Leiria e OestePublication . Silva, Agostinho da; Lopes, Carla; Almeida, Isabel; Carriço, Silvia; Mouga, Teresa; Carriço, Silvia; Siopa, Jorge; Gala, Pedro; Antunes, Mário; Silva, Agostinho; Mouga, Teresa; Lopes, Carla, Alexandra Calado Lopes; Gala, Pedro; Siopa, JorgeA EM@IPLeiria é um think tank criado em 2023 para impulsionar um desenvolvimento sustentável, inovador e competitivo na região de Leiria e Oeste. Mais do que um centro de estudos, é uma fábrica de ideias e soluções, dedicada à análise dos desafios estruturais do território, à identificação de novas oportunidades e ao teste de respostas concretas para problemas reais. Como espaço de cocriação e experimentação, a EM@IPLeiria envolve diversos atores regionais, incluindo autarquias, empresas, instituições de ensino e a sociedade civil, promovendo um modelo de trabalho colaborativo e participativo na construção de estratégias para o futuro. A sua abordagem alia design thinking e prospetiva estratégica, permitindo antecipar tendências, conceber cenários e testar soluções inovadoras antes da sua aplicação em larga escala.
- Validation of the Telephone-Administered Version of the Mediterranean Diet Adherence Screener (MEDAS) QuestionnairePublication . Gregório, Maria João; Rodrigues, Ana M.; Salvador, Clara; Dias, Sara S.; Sousa, Rute D. de; Mendes, Jorge M.; Coelho, Pedro S.; Branco, Jaime C.; Lopes, Carla; Martínez-González, Miguel A.; Graça, Pedro; Canhão, HelenaA 14-Item Mediterranean Diet Adherence Screener (MEDAS) questionnaire was developed and validated in face-to-face interviews, but not via telephone. The aims of this study were to evaluate the validity and reliability of a telephone-administered version of the MEDAS as well as to validate the Portuguese version of the MEDAS questionnaire. A convenience community-based sample of adults (n = 224) participated in a three-stage survey. First, trained researchers administered MEDAS via a telephone. Second, the Portuguese version of Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ), and MEDAS were administered in a semi-structured face-to-face interview. Finally, MEDAS was again administered via telephone. The telephone-administered MEDAS questionnaire was compared with the face-to-face-version using several metrics. The telephone-administered MEDAS was significantly correlated with the face-to-face-administered MEDAS [r = 0.805, p < 0.001; interclass correlation coefficient (ICC) = 0.803, p < 0.001] and showed strong agreement (k = 0.60). The MEDAS scores that were obtained in the first and second telephone interviews were significantly correlated (r = 0.661, p < 0.001; ICC = 0.639, p < 0.001). The overall agreement between the Portuguese version of MEDAS and the FFQ-derived Mediterranean diet adherence score had a Cohen's k = 0.39. The telephone-administered version of MEDAS is a valid tool for assessing the adherence to the Mediterranean diet and acquiring data for large population-based studies.