Resources for speech synthesis of Viennese varieties

This paper describes our work on developing corpora of three varieties of Viennese for unit selection speech synthesis. The synthetic voices for Viennese varieties, implemented with the open domain unit selection speech synthesis engine Multisyn of Festival will also be released within Festival. The paper especially focuses on two questions: how we selected the appropriate speakers and how we obtained the text sources needed for the recording of these non-standard varieties. Regarding the first one, it turned out that working with a 'prototypical' professional speaker was much more preferable than striving for authenticity. In addition, we give a brief outline about the differences between the Austrian standard and its dialectal varieties and how we solved certain technical problems that are related to these differences. In particular, the specific set of phones applicable to each variety had to be determined by applying various constraints. Since such a set does not serve any descriptive purposes but rather is influencing the quality of speech synthesis, a careful design of such a (in most cases reduced) set was an important task

Optimizing Phonetic Encoding for Viennese Unit Selection Speech Synthesis

While developing lexical resources for a particular language variety (Viennese), we experimented with a set of 5 different phonetic encodings, termed phone sets, used for unit selection speech synthesis. We started with a very rich phone set based on phonological considerations and covering as much phonetic variability as possible, which was then reduced to smaller sets by applying transformation rules that map or merge phone symbols. The optimal trade-off was found measuring the phone error rates of automatically learnt grapheme-to-phone rules and by a perceptual evaluation of 27 representative synthesized sentences. Further, we describe a method to semi-automatically enlarge the lexical resources for the target language variety using a lexicon base for Standard Austrian German

Akustische Phonetik und ihre multidisziplinären Aspekte

The aim of this book is to honor the multidisciplinary work of Doz. Dr. Sylvia Moosmüller† in the field of acoustic phonetics. The essays in this volume range from sociophonetics, language diagnostics, dialectology, to language technology. They thus exemplify the breadth of acoustic phonetics, which has been shaped by influences from the humanities and technical sciences since its beginnings.Ziel dieses Buches ist es, die multidisziplinäre Arbeit von Doz. Dr. Sylvia Moosmüller (†) im Bereich der akustischen Phonetik zu würdigen. Die Aufsätze in diesem Band sind in der Soziophonetik, Sprachdiagnostik, Dialektologie und Sprachtechnologie angesiedelt. Sie stellen damit exemplarisch die Breite der akustischen Phonetik dar, die seit ihrer Entstehung durch Einflüsse aus den Geisteswissenschaften und den technischen Wissenschaften geprägt war

Modelling and Interpolation of Austrian German and Viennese

Abstract An HMM-based speech synthesis framework is applied to both Standard Austrian German and a Viennese dialectal variety and several training strategies for multi-dialect modeling such as dialect clustering and dialect-adaptive training are investigated. For bridging the gap between processing on the level of HMMs and on the linguistic level, we add phonological transformations to the HMM interpolation and apply them to dialect interpolation. The crucial steps are to employ several formalized phonological rules between Austrian German and Viennese dialect as constraints for the HMM interpolation. We verify the effectiveness of this strategy in a number of perceptual evaluations. Since the HMM space used is not articulatory but acoustic space, there are some variations in evaluation results between the phonological rules. However, in general we obtained good evaluation results which show that listeners can perceive both continuous and categorical changes of dialect varieties by using phonological transformations employed as switching rules in the HMM interpolation

Modeling and interpolation of Austrian German and Viennese dialect in HMM-based speech synthesis

International audienceAn HMM-based speech synthesis framework is applied to both Standard Austrian German and a Viennese dialectal variety and several training strategies for multi-dialect modeling such as dialect clustering and dialect-adaptive training are investigated. For bridging the gap between processing on the level of HMMs and on the linguistic level, we add phonological transformations to the HMM interpolation and apply them to dialect interpolation. The crucial steps are to employ several formalized phonological rules between Austrian German and Viennese dialect as constraints for the HMM interpolation. We verify the effectiveness of this strategy in a number of perceptual evaluations. Since the HMM space used is not articulatory but acoustic space, there are some variations in evaluation results between the phonological rules. However, in general we obtained good evaluation results which show that listeners can perceive both continuous and categorical changes of dialect varieties by using phonological transformations employed as switching rules in the HMM interpolation

VARIATIONist Linguistics meets CONTACT Linguistics

The current volume is dedicated to the inherently heterogeneous nature of language(s) as seen from the perspective of variationist linguistics and contact linguistics, which became established and internationally recognized sub-disciplines of (socio)linguistics during the latter half of the 20th century. Over the last few years, each paradigm has broadened the spectrum of the topics under investigation considerably, but there has not yet been an extensive and satisfactory exchange between the two scientific fields named. The present volume aims at giving an insight into the complex synergy between occurring linguistic contact constellation, on the one hand, and variation in the parlance, on the other hand

VARIATIONist Linguistics meets CONTACT Linguistics

The current volume is dedicated to the inherently heterogeneous nature of language(s) as seen from the perspective of variationist linguistics and contact linguistics, which became established and internationally recognized sub-disciplines of (socio)linguistics during the latter half of the 20th century. Over the last few years, each paradigm has broadened the spectrum of the topics under investigation considerably, but there has not yet been an extensive and satisfactory exchange between the two scientific fields named. The present volume aims at giving an insight into the complex synergy between occurring linguistic contact constellation, on the one hand, and variation in the parlance, on the other hand

Menorah Review (No. 36, Winter, 1996)

Surviving the Twentieth Century -- On Jewish Art: Wherefore Art Thou? -- Leah -- The Message of Kohelet -- Holocaust Texts: A Newer Testament -- Jewish Women and Jewish Writers -- Places -- Book Briefing

Ongoing inventory on landrace potato onions in Finland

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Id EFL Learning: An Implication For Learning Internalization

It is plausible that the psychoanalytic approach holds an important role in exploring people’s personalities, the world of conscious drives. The human personality is categorized into id, ego, and superego, while consciousness is divided into three different provinces, namely unconscious, subconscious, and conscious. However, limited language teachers’ interest in exploring such beneficial approach to learning is found. To respond to such gap, a systematic literature review was employed with following phases: identification, comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesis. Results revealed that four id EFL learning characteristics are primitive personality, biological identity, an instinct to seek pleasure, and automaticity. Hiding, covering, and undressing are the indicators of the primitive personality and are human biological responses to danger. On the other hand, the human senses, cognitive process, and speech organs define the EFL learners' biological personality. As for the automaticity learning, it seems to be achievable by unconscious learning and good learning culture. The basic assumption is that a higher-level skill cannot be acquired unless a lower one has been automatized. Applying such concepts, the characteristics of seeking pleasure to learn language, needs the creativity of EFL teachers, delightful teaching, good teaching culture, and facilities as once EFL learning automatized or internalized, enormous impact will be gained. Keywords: automaticity; EFL internalization; id; psychoanalysis; unconscious drive