| 1. |
- Eriksson, Anders, 1939-, et al.
(författare)
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The acoustics of word stress in English as a function of stress level and speaking style
- 2015
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Ingår i: 16th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2015). - ISCA : ISCA. - 9781510817906 ; , s. 41-45
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study of lexical stress in English is part of a series of studies, the goal of which is to describe the acoustics of lexical stress for a number of typologically different languages. When fully developed the methodology should be applicable to any language. The database of recordings so far includes Brazilian Portuguese, English (U.K.), Estonian, German, French, Italian and Swedish. The acoustic parameters examined are f0-level, f0-variation, Duration, and Spectral Emphasis. Values for these parameters, computed for all vowels, are the data upon which the analyses are based. All parameters are tested with respect to their correlation with stress level (primary, secondary, unstressed) and speaking style (wordlist reading, phrase reading, spontaneous speech). For the English data, the most robust results concerning stress level are found for Duration and Spectral Emphasis. f0-level is also significantly correlated but not quite to the same degree. The acoustic effect of phonological secondary stress was significantly different from primary stress only for Duration. In the statistical tests, speaker sex turned out as significant in most cases. Detailed examination showed, however, that the difference was mainly in the degree to which a given parameter was used, not how it was used to signal lexical stress contrasts.
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| 2. |
- Lopes, José, et al.
(författare)
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Detecting Repetitions in Spoken Dialogue Systems Using Phonetic Distances
- 2015
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Ingår i: INTERSPEECH-2015. - 9781510817906 ; , s. 1805-1809
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Repetitions in Spoken Dialogue Systems can be a symptom of problematic communication. Such repetitions are often due to speech recognition errors, which in turn makes it harder to use the output of the speech recognizer to detect repetitions. In this paper, we combine the alignment score obtained using phonetic distances with dialogue-related features to improve repetition detection. To evaluate the method proposed we compare several alignment techniques from edit distance to DTW-based distance, previously used in Spoken-Term detection tasks. We also compare two different methods to compute the phonetic distance: the first one using the phoneme sequence, and the second one using the distance between the phone posterior vectors. Two different datasets were used in this evaluation: a bus-schedule information system (in English) and a call routing system (in Swedish). The results show that approaches using phoneme distances over-perform approaches using Levenshtein distances between ASR outputs for repetition detection.
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| 3. |
- Włodarczak, Marcin, 1984-, et al.
(författare)
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Communicative needs and respiratory constraints
- 2015
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Ingår i: 16th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2015). - ISCA : ISCA. - 9781510817906 ; , s. 3051-3055, s. 3051-3055
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study investigates timing of communicative behaviour with respect to speaker’s respiratory cycle. The data is drawn from a corpus of multiparty conversations in Swedish. We find that while longer utterances (> 1 s) are tied, predictably, primarily to exhalation onset, shorter vocalisations are spread more uni- formly across the respiratory cycle. In addition, nods, which are free from any respiratory constraints, are most frequently found around exhalation offsets, where respiratory requirements for even a short utterance are not satisfied. We interpret the results to reflect the economy principle in speech production, whereby respiratory effort, associated primarily with starting a new respiratory cycle, is minimised within the scope of speaker’s communicative goals.
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