19,079 research outputs found
Natural language processing
Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems
Artimate: an articulatory animation framework for audiovisual speech synthesis
We present a modular framework for articulatory animation synthesis using
speech motion capture data obtained with electromagnetic articulography (EMA).
Adapting a skeletal animation approach, the articulatory motion data is applied
to a three-dimensional (3D) model of the vocal tract, creating a portable
resource that can be integrated in an audiovisual (AV) speech synthesis
platform to provide realistic animation of the tongue and teeth for a virtual
character. The framework also provides an interface to articulatory animation
synthesis, as well as an example application to illustrate its use with a 3D
game engine. We rely on cross-platform, open-source software and open standards
to provide a lightweight, accessible, and portable workflow.Comment: Workshop on Innovation and Applications in Speech Technology (2012
Speech vocoding for laboratory phonology
Using phonological speech vocoding, we propose a platform for exploring
relations between phonology and speech processing, and in broader terms, for
exploring relations between the abstract and physical structures of a speech
signal. Our goal is to make a step towards bridging phonology and speech
processing and to contribute to the program of Laboratory Phonology. We show
three application examples for laboratory phonology: compositional phonological
speech modelling, a comparison of phonological systems and an experimental
phonological parametric text-to-speech (TTS) system. The featural
representations of the following three phonological systems are considered in
this work: (i) Government Phonology (GP), (ii) the Sound Pattern of English
(SPE), and (iii) the extended SPE (eSPE). Comparing GP- and eSPE-based vocoded
speech, we conclude that the latter achieves slightly better results than the
former. However, GP - the most compact phonological speech representation -
performs comparably to the systems with a higher number of phonological
features. The parametric TTS based on phonological speech representation, and
trained from an unlabelled audiobook in an unsupervised manner, achieves
intelligibility of 85% of the state-of-the-art parametric speech synthesis. We
envision that the presented approach paves the way for researchers in both
fields to form meaningful hypotheses that are explicitly testable using the
concepts developed and exemplified in this paper. On the one hand, laboratory
phonologists might test the applied concepts of their theoretical models, and
on the other hand, the speech processing community may utilize the concepts
developed for the theoretical phonological models for improvements of the
current state-of-the-art applications
BiSinger: Bilingual Singing Voice Synthesis
Although Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) has made great strides with
Text-to-Speech (TTS) techniques, multilingual singing voice modeling remains
relatively unexplored. This paper presents BiSinger, a bilingual pop SVS system
for English and Chinese Mandarin. Current systems require separate models per
language and cannot accurately represent both Chinese and English, hindering
code-switch SVS. To address this gap, we design a shared representation between
Chinese and English singing voices, achieved by using the CMU dictionary with
mapping rules. We fuse monolingual singing datasets with open-source singing
voice conversion techniques to generate bilingual singing voices while also
exploring the potential use of bilingual speech data. Experiments affirm that
our language-independent representation and incorporation of related datasets
enable a single model with enhanced performance in English and code-switch SVS
while maintaining Chinese song performance. Audio samples are available at
https://bisinger-svs.github.io.Comment: Accepted by ASRU202
A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication
In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is
presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot
interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid
human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an
organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot
communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to
a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion
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