Применение лингвистических признаков для автоматического определения интонационно выделенных слов в русскоязычном тексте

The article presents a method of detecting prosodically prominent words, i.e. words that carry most of the information in the utterance. The method relies on lexical, grammatical and syntactic markers of prominence, and can be used in Text-to-Speech synthesis systems to make synthesized speech sound more natural. Three different classification methods were used: Naive Bayes, Maximum Entropy and Conditional Random Fields models. The results of the experiments show that discriminative models provide more balanced values of the performance metrics, while the generative model is potentially more useful for detecting prominent words in speech signal. The results of the study are comparable with the performances of similar systems developed for other languages, and in some cases surpass them.В данной статье предлагается метод автоматического предсказания интонационно выделенных слов, то есть наиболее важной информации в высказывании. Метод опирается на использование лексических, грамматических и синтаксических маркеров интонационного выделения, что делает возможным его применение в системах синтеза речи по тексту, где реализация интонационного выделения может повысить естественность звучания синтезированной речи. В качестве методов классификации независимо друг от друга использовалось несколько различных моделей: наивная байесовская модель, модель максимальной энтропии и условные случайные поля. Сопоставление результатов, полученных в ходе нескольких экспериментов, показало, что использовавшиеся дискриминативные модели демонстрируют сбалансированные и примерно равные значения метрик качества, в то время как генеративная модель потенциально более пригодна для поиска интонационно выделенных слов в речевом сигнале. Результаты, представленные в статье, сравнимы и в некоторых случаях превосходят аналогичные системы, разработанные для других языков

Acoustic identification of sentence accent in speakers with dysarthria : cross-population validation and severity related patterns

Dysprosody is a hallmark of dysarthria, which can affect the intelligibility and naturalness of speech. This includes sentence accent, which helps to draw listeners’ attention to important information in the message. Although some studies have investigated this feature, we currently lack properly validated automated procedures that can distinguish between subtle performance differences observed across speakers with dysarthria. This study aims for cross-population validation of a set of acoustic features that have previously been shown to correlate with sentence accent. In addition, the impact of dysarthria severity levels on sentence accent production is investigated. Two groups of adults were analysed (Dutch and English speakers). Fifty-eight participants with dysarthria and 30 healthy control participants (HCP) produced sentences with varying accent positions. All speech samples were evaluated perceptually and analysed acoustically with an algorithm that extracts ten meaningful prosodic features and allows a classification between accented and unaccented syllables based on a linear combination of these parameters. The data were statistically analysed using discriminant analysis. Within the Dutch and English dysarthric population, the algorithm correctly identified 82.8 and 91.9% of the accented target syllables, respectively, indicating that the capacity to discriminate between accented and unaccented syllables in a sentence is consistent with perceptual impressions. Moreover, different strategies for accent production across dysarthria severity levels could be demonstrated, which is an important step toward a better understanding of the nature of the deficit and the automatic classification of dysarthria severity using prosodic features