Multi-Agent Simulation of Emergence of Schwa Deletion Pattern in Hindi

Recently, there has been a revival of interest in multi-agent simulation techniques for exploring the nature of language change. However, a lack of appropriate validation of simulation experiments against real language data often calls into question the general applicability of these methods in modeling realistic language change. We try to address this issue here by making an attempt to model the phenomenon of schwa deletion in Hindi through a multi-agent simulation framework. The pattern of Hindi schwa deletion and its diachronic nature are well studied, not only out of general linguistic inquiry, but also to facilitate Hindi grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, which is a preprocessing step to text-to-speech synthesis. We show that under certain conditions, the schwa deletion pattern observed in modern Hindi emerges in the system from an initial state of no deletion. The simulation framework described in this work can be extended to model other phonological changes as well.Language Change, Linguistic Agent, Language Game, Multi-Agent Simulation, Schwa Deletion

PROSODY PREDICTION FOR TAMIL TEXT-TO-SPEECH SYNTHESIZER USING SENTIMENT ANALYSIS

A speech synthesizer which sounds similar to a human voice is preferred over a robotic voice, and hence to increase the naturalness of a speech synthesizer an efficacious prosody model is imperative. Hence, this paper is focused on developing a prosody prediction model using sentiment analysis for a Tamil speech synthesizer. Two variations of prosody prediction models using SentiWordNet are experimented: one without a stemmer and the other with a stemmer. The prosody prediction model with a stemmer performs much more efficiently than the one without a stemmer as it tackles the highly agglutinative and inflectional words in Tamil language in a better way and is exemplified clearly, in this paper. The performance of the prosody prediction model with a stemmer has a higher classification accuracy of 77% on the test set in comparison to the 57% accuracy by the prosody model without a stemmer.Â

Generic Indic Text-to-speech Synthesisers with Rapid Adaptation in an End-to-end Framework

Building text-to-speech (TTS) synthesisers for Indian languages is a difficult task owing to a large number of active languages. Indian languages can be classified into a finite set of families, prominent among them, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. The proposed work exploits this property to build a generic TTS system using multiple languages from the same family in an end-to-end framework. Generic systems are quite robust as they are capable of capturing a variety of phonotactics across languages. These systems are then adapted to a new language in the same family using small amounts of adaptation data. Experiments indicate that good quality TTS systems can be built using only 7 minutes of adaptation data. An average degradation mean opinion score of 3.98 is obtained for the adapted TTSes. Extensive analysis of systematic interactions between languages in the generic TTSes is carried out. x-vectors are included as speaker embedding to synthesise text in a particular speaker's voice. An interesting observation is that the prosody of the target speaker's voice is preserved. These results are quite promising as they indicate the capability of generic TTSes to handle speaker and language switching seamlessly, along with the ease of adaptation to a new language

Marathi Speech Synthesis: A Review

This paper seeks to reveal the various aspects of Marathi Speech synthesis. This paper has reviewed research development in the International languages as well as Indian languages and then centering on the development in Marathi languages with regard to other Indian languages. It is anticipated that this work will serve to explore more in Marathi language. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15064

Vowel classification based approach for Telugu Text-to-Speech System using symbol concatenation

Telugu is one of the oldest languages in India. This paper describes the development of Telugu Text-to-Speech System (TTS) using vowel classification. Vowels are most important class of sound in most Indian languages. The duration of vowel is longer than consonants and is most significant. Here vowels are categorized as starting middle and end according to the position of occurrence in a word. The algorithm developed by us involves analysis of a sentence in terms of words and then symbols involving combination of pure consonants and vowels. Wave files are being merged as per the requirement to generate the modified consonants influenced by deergalu (vowel sign) and yuktaksharas generate the speech from a text. Speech unit database consisting of vowels (starting, middle and end) and consonants is developed. We evaluated our TTS using Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for intelligibility and voice quality with and without using vowel classification from sixty five listeners, and got better results with vowel classification