Using the segmentation corpus to define an inventory of concatenative units for Cantonese speech synthesis

Wong, Wai Yi; Brew, Chris; Beckman, Mary E.; Chan, Shui Duen

doi:10.3115/1118824.1118837

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…These CV phonotactic probabilities were calculated based on an adult online lexicon for each language the Segmentation Corpus (Chan and Tang, 1999;Wong et al, 2002) for Cantonese, the Hoosier Mental Lexicon (HML, Nusbaum et al, 1984) for English, the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) database (Gavrilidou et al, 1999) for Greek, the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) database (Amano and Kondo, 1999) for Japanese, and NIKL database (National Institute of the Korean Language, 2000)…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-linguistic studies of children’s and adults’ vowel spaces

Chung

Kong

Edwards

et al. 2012

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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This study examines cross-linguistic variation in the location of shared vowels in the vowel space across five languages (Cantonese, American English, Greek, Japanese, and Korean) and three age groups (2-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults). The vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ were elicited in familiar words using a word repetition task. The productions of target words were recorded and transcribed by native speakers of each language. For correctly produced vowels, first and second formant frequencies were measured. In order to remove the effect of vocal tract size on these measurements, a normalization approach that calculates distance and angular displacement from the speaker centroid was adopted. Language-specific differences in the location of shared vowels in the formant values as well as the shape of the vowel spaces were observed for both adults and children.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-linguistic studies of children’s and adults’ vowel spaces

Chung

Kong

Edwards

et al. 2012

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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“…The two courses were planned and developed with support from an SBC/Ameritech Faculty Research Fellowship for "Building Systems to Teach Speech Synthesis" awarded to Mary Beckman and Chris Brew. The award funded three graduate students for two terms to build components of Festivalbased text-to-speech synthesis systems for Puerto Rican Spanish, Hong Kong Cantonese, and Seoul Korean, leading to several student-authored publications (e.g., [35,36]). The course on building TTS systems was able then to take advantage of the Graduate Research Associates' experience in using the Festival system as well as of Alan Black's infrastructure and documentation (http://festvox.org/) which was already welldeveloped at that time.…”

Section: Evaluation Of the Vm Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

Sharing Speech Synthesis Software for Research and Education Within Low-Tech and Low-Resource Communities

Plummer

Beckman

2016

Interspeech 2016

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Parametric speech synthesis has played an integral role in speech research since the 1950s. However, software sharing is unwieldy, making replication of experiments difficult, creating obstacles to communication between laboratories, and hindering entry into research. This paper describes our use of the Speech Recognition Virtual Kitchen environment (www.speechkitchen.org) to develop an infrastructure for sharing synthesis software for research and education. We tested the infrastructure by using it in teaching a seminar on "the speech science of speech synthesis" to students from several of the graduate programs in linguistics at the Ohio State University. Using the virtual machines that we developed for Klatt's formant synthesis program and Kawahara's STRAIGHT speech analysis, modification, and synthesis system enabled the students to advance much further in their understanding of the basic principles underlying these acoustic-domain models by comparison to the students enrolled in a similar seminar that we taught previously without the virtual machines. At the same time, implementing these and two other virtual machines for the course did not live up to our expectations for the course, in ways that highlight the need to adapt both the Speech Kitchen environment and the synthesis software systems to the needs of low-tech, low-resource users.

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“…(For example, in /t h e 55 jt 2 / 'tomorrow' [t h t 55+2 ], while the CV sequence [t h ] is present in the standard Cantonese phonotactics, the VC sequences [t] is not.) These above fusion forms would pose problem to Cantonese speech synthesis systems that are developed based on the standard inventory and phonotactics of Cantonese [3,5,8]. Possible considerations for improving the synthesizers include: how to augment the basic inventory of concatenative units with fusion forms; what degree(s) of fusion need(s) to be modeled; whether it is desirable to have a mixed inventory of diphones and triphones; whether some other sizes of units are necessary, etc.…”

Section: Implications For Synthesizing Prosodymentioning

confidence: 99%

Syllable fusion and speech rate in hong kong Cantonese

Wong

2004

Speech Prosody 2004

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Syllable fusion is a Hong Kong Cantonese connected speech process, whereby edges of syllables are obscured by consonant lenition or deletion, and vowel reduction. More extreme fusion can simplify contour tones and merge the qualities of vowels that would be separated by an onset or coda consonant at more normal degrees of disjuncture between words. This paper investigates the influence of speech rate on syllable fusion. An experiment tested the prediction that faster speech rate would give rise to more occurrences of fusion forms and a greater degree of fusion. Subjects repeated word groups in two conditions: at normal rate and at fastest possible speech rates. Results show that speech rate is a reliable predictor for the amount and for the degree of fusion. Implications for incorporating prosody in speech synthesis systems are discussed.

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Using the segmentation corpus to define an inventory of concatenative units for Cantonese speech synthesis

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

Cross-linguistic studies of children’s and adults’ vowel spaces

Cross-linguistic studies of children’s and adults’ vowel spaces

Sharing Speech Synthesis Software for Research and Education Within Low-Tech and Low-Resource Communities

Syllable fusion and speech rate in hong kong Cantonese

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