SKOPE: A connectionist/symbolic architecture of spoken Korean processing

Spoken language processing requires speech and natural language integration. Moreover, spoken Korean calls for unique processing methodology due to its linguistic characteristics. This paper presents SKOPE, a connectionist/symbolic spoken Korean processing engine, which emphasizes that: 1) connectionist and symbolic techniques must be selectively applied according to their relative strength and weakness, and 2) the linguistic characteristics of Korean must be fully considered for phoneme recognition, speech and language integration, and morphological/syntactic processing. The design and implementation of SKOPE demonstrates how connectionist/symbolic hybrid architectures can be constructed for spoken agglutinative language processing. Also SKOPE presents many novel ideas for speech and language processing. The phoneme recognition, morphological analysis, and syntactic analysis experiments show that SKOPE is a viable approach for the spoken Korean processing.Comment: 8 pages, latex, use aaai.sty & aaai.bst, bibfile: nlpsp.bib, to be presented at IJCAI95 workshops on new approaches to learning for natural language processin

Language identification with suprasegmental cues: A study based on speech resynthesis

This paper proposes a new experimental paradigm to explore the discriminability of languages, a question which is crucial to the child born in a bilingual environment. This paradigm employs the speech resynthesis technique, enabling the experimenter to preserve or degrade acoustic cues such as phonotactics, syllabic rhythm or intonation from natural utterances. English and Japanese sentences were resynthesized, preserving broad phonotactics, rhythm and intonation (Condition 1), rhythm and intonation (Condition 2), intonation only (Condition 3), or rhythm only (Condition 4). The findings support the notion that syllabic rhythm is a necessary and sufficient cue for French adult subjects to discriminate English from Japanese sentences. The results are consistent with previous research using low-pass filtered speech, as well as with phonological theories predicting rhythmic differences between languages. Thus, the new methodology proposed appears to be well-suited to study language discrimination. Applications for other domains of psycholinguistic research and for automatic language identification are considered

Assessing the effect of ambiguity in compositionality signaling on the processing of diphones

Consonantal diphones differ as to their ambiguity (whether or not they indicate morphological complexity reliably by occurring exclusively either within or across morphemes) and lexicality (how frequently they occur within morphemes rather than across morpheme boundaries). This study empirically investigates the influence of ambiguity and lexicality on the processing speed of consonantal diphones in speech perception. More specifically, its goal is to test the predictions of the Strong Morphonotactic Hypothesis, which asserts that phonotactic processing is influenced by morphological structure, and to clarify the two conceptions thereof present in extant research. In two discrimination task experiments, it is found that the processing speed of cross-morpheme diphones decreases with their ambiguity, but there is no processing difference between primarily crossmorphemic and morpheme-internal diphones. We conclude that the predictions of the Strong Morphonotactic Hypothesis are borne out only partially, and we discuss the discrepancies

Towards Personalized Synthesized Voices for Individuals with Vocal Disabilities: Voice Banking and Reconstruction

When individuals lose the ability to produce their own speech, due to degenerative diseases such as motor neurone disease (MND) or Parkinson’s, they lose not only a functional means of communication but also a display of their individual and group identity. In order to build personalized synthetic voices, attempts have been made to capture the voice before it is lost, using a process known as voice banking. But, for some patients, the speech deterioration frequently coincides or quickly follows diagnosis. Using HMM-based speech synthesis, it is now possible to build personalized synthetic voices with minimal data recordings and even disordered speech. The power of this approach is that it is possible to use the patient’s recordings to adapt existing voice models pre-trained on many speakers. When the speech has begun to deteriorate, the adapted voice model can be further modified in order to compensate for the disordered characteristics found in the patient’s speech. The University of Edinburgh has initiated a project for voice banking and reconstruction based on this speech synthesis technology. At the current stage of the project, more than fifteen patients with MND have already been recorded and five of them have been delivered a reconstructed voice. In this paper, we present an overview of the project as well as subjective assessments of the reconstructed voices and feedback from patients and their families

The cross-linguistic performance of word segmentation models over time.

We select three word segmentation models with psycholinguistic foundations - transitional probabilities, the diphone-based segmenter, and PUDDLE - which track phoneme co-occurrence and positional frequencies in input strings, and in the case of PUDDLE build lexical and diphone inventories. The models are evaluated on caregiver utterances in 132 CHILDES corpora representing 28 languages and 11.9 m words. PUDDLE shows the best performance overall, albeit with wide cross-linguistic variation. We explore the reasons for this variation, fitting regression models to performance scores with linguistic properties which capture lexico-phonological characteristics of the input: word length, utterance length, diversity in the lexicon, the frequency of one-word utterances, the regularity of phoneme patterns at word boundaries, and the distribution of diphones in each language. These properties together explain four-tenths of the observed variation in segmentation performance, a strong outcome and a solid foundation for studying further variables which make the segmentation task difficult

Phonetic accommodation to natural and synthetic voices : Behavior of groups and individuals in speech shadowing

The present study investigates whether native speakers of German phonetically accommodate to natural and synthetic voices in a shadowing experiment. We aim to determine whether this phenomenon, which is frequently found in HHI, also occurs in HCI involving synthetic speech. The examined features pertain to different phonetic domains: allophonic variation, schwa epenthesis, realization of pitch accents, word-based temporal structure and distribution of spectral energy. On the individual level, we found that the participants converged to varying subsets of the examined features, while they maintained their baseline behavior in other cases or, in rare instances, even diverged from the model voices. This shows that accommodation with respect to one particular feature may not predict the behavior with respect to another feature. On the group level, the participants of the natural condition converged to all features under examination, however very subtly so for schwa epenthesis. The synthetic voices, while partly reducing the strength of effects found for the natural voices, triggered accommodating behavior as well. The predominant pattern for all voice types was convergence during the interaction followed by divergence after the interaction

The Edge of Order: Analytic Bias in Ludlings

Linguistic

Phonetic accommodation of human interlocutors in the context of human-computer interaction

Phonetic accommodation refers to the phenomenon that interlocutors adapt their way of speaking to each other within an interaction. This can have a positive influence on the communication quality. As we increasingly use spoken language to interact with computers these days, the phenomenon of phonetic accommodation is also investigated in the context of human-computer interaction: on the one hand, to find out whether speakers adapt to a computer agent in a similar way as they do to a human interlocutor, on the other hand, to implement accommodation behavior in spoken dialog systems and explore how this affects their users. To date, the focus has been mainly on the global acoustic-prosodic level. The present work demonstrates that speakers interacting with a computer agent also identify locally anchored phonetic phenomena such as segmental allophonic variation and local prosodic features as accommodation targets and converge on them. To this end, we conducted two experiments. First, we applied the shadowing method, where the participants repeated short sentences from natural and synthetic model speakers. In the second experiment, we used the Wizard-of-Oz method, in which an intelligent spoken dialog system is simulated, to enable a dynamic exchange between the participants and a computer agent — the virtual language learning tutor Mirabella. The target language of our experiments was German. Phonetic convergence occurred in both experiments when natural voices were used as well as when synthetic voices were used as stimuli. Moreover, both native and non-native speakers of the target language converged to Mirabella. Thus, accommodation could be relevant, for example, in the context of computer-assisted language learning. Individual variation in accommodation behavior can be attributed in part to speaker-specific characteristics, one of which is assumed to be the personality structure. We included the Big Five personality traits as well as the concept of mental boundaries in the analysis of our data. Different personality traits influenced accommodation to different types of phonetic features. Mental boundaries have not been studied before in the context of phonetic accommodation. We created a validated German adaptation of a questionnaire that assesses the strength of mental boundaries. The latter can be used in future studies involving mental boundaries in native speakers of German.Bei phonetischer Akkommodation handelt es sich um das Phänomen, dass Gesprächspartner ihre Sprechweise innerhalb einer Interaktion aneinander anpassen. Dies kann die Qualität der Kommunikation positiv beeinflussen. Da wir heutzutage immer öfter mittels gesprochener Sprache mit Computern interagieren, wird das Phänomen der phonetischen Akkommodation auch im Kontext der Mensch-Computer-Interaktion untersucht: zum einen, um herauszufinden, ob sich Sprecher an einen Computeragenten in ähnlicher Weise anpassen wie an einen menschlichen Gesprächspartner, zum anderen, um das Akkommodationsverhalten in Sprachdialogsysteme zu implementieren und zu erforschen, wie dieses auf ihre Benutzer wirkt. Bislang lag der Fokus dabei hauptsächlich auf der globalen akustisch-prosodischen Ebene. Die vorliegende Arbeit zeigt, dass Sprecher in Interaktion mit einem Computeragenten auch lokal verankerte phonetische Phänomene wie segmentale allophone Variation und lokale prosodische Merkmale als Akkommodationsziele identifizieren und in Bezug auf diese konvergieren. Dabei wendeten wir in einem ersten Experiment die Shadowing-Methode an, bei der die Teilnehmer kurze Sätze von natürlichen und synthetischen Modellsprechern wiederholten. In einem zweiten Experiment ermöglichten wir mit der Wizard-of-Oz-Methode, bei der ein intelligentes Sprachdialogsystem simuliert wird, einen dynamischen Austausch zwischen den Teilnehmern und einem Computeragenten — der virtuellen Sprachlerntutorin Mirabella. Die Zielsprache unserer Experimente war Deutsch. Phonetische Konvergenz trat in beiden Experimenten sowohl bei Verwendung natürlicher Stimmen als auch bei Verwendung synthetischer Stimmen als Stimuli auf. Zudem konvergierten sowohl Muttersprachler als auch Nicht-Muttersprachler der Zielsprache zu Mirabella. Somit könnte Akkommodation zum Beispiel im Kontext des computergstützten Sprachenlernens zum Tragen kommen. Individuelle Variation im Akkommodationsverhalten kann unter anderem auf sprecherspezifische Eigenschaften zurückgeführt werden. Es wird vermutet, dass zu diesen auch die Persönlichkeitsstruktur gehört. Wir bezogen die Big Five Persönlichkeitsmerkmale sowie das Konzept der mentalen Grenzen in die Analyse unserer Daten ein. Verschiedene Persönlichkeitsmerkmale beeinflussten die Akkommodation zu unterschiedlichen Typen von phonetischen Merkmalen. Die mentalen Grenzen sind im Zusammenhang mit phonetischer Akkommodation zuvor noch nicht untersucht worden. Wir erstellten eine validierte deutsche Adaptierung eines Fragebogens, der die Stärke der mentalen Grenzen erhebt. Diese kann in zukünftigen Untersuchungen mentaler Grenzen bei Muttersprachlern des Deutschen verwendet werden.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) – Projektnummer 278805297: "Phonetische Konvergenz in der Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation