Towards glottal source controllability in expressive speech synthesis

In order to obtain more human like sounding humanmachine interfaces we must first be able to give them expressive capabilities in the way of emotional and stylistic features so as to closely adequate them to the intended task. If we want to replicate those features it is not enough to merely replicate the prosodic information of fundamental frequency and speaking rhythm. The proposed additional layer is the modification of the glottal model, for which we make use of the GlottHMM parameters. This paper analyzes the viability of such an approach by verifying that the expressive nuances are captured by the aforementioned features, obtaining 95% recognition rates on styled speaking and 82% on emotional speech. Then we evaluate the effect of speaker bias and recording environment on the source modeling in order to quantify possible problems when analyzing multi-speaker databases. Finally we propose a speaking styles separation for Spanish based on prosodic features and check its perceptual significance

Language identification based on a discriminative text categorization technique

In this paper, we describe new results and improvements to a lan-guage identification (LID) system based on PPRLM previously introduced in [1] and [2]. In this case, we use as parallel phone recognizers the ones provided by the Brno University of Technology for Czech, Hungarian, and Russian lan-guages, and instead of using traditional n-gram language models we use a lan-guage model that is created using a ranking with the most frequent and discrim-inative n-grams. In this language model approach, the distance between the ranking for the input sentence and the ranking for each language is computed, based on the difference in relative positions for each n-gram. This approach is able to model reliably longer span information than in traditional language models obtaining more reliable estimations. We also describe the modifications that we have being introducing along the time to the original ranking technique, e.g., different discriminative formulas to establish the ranking, variations of the template size, the suppression of repeated consecutive phones, and a new clus-tering technique for the ranking scores. Results show that this technique pro-vides a 12.9% relative improvement over PPRLM. Finally, we also describe re-sults where the traditional PPRLM and our ranking technique are combined

Effective Communication without Verbs? Sure!

Nominal utterances are very frequent, especially in social media texts, and play a crucial role as they are very dense from a semantic point of view. In spite of this, their automatic identification has received little to no attention. We have thus developed a framework for the annotation of nominal utterances and created the manually annotated corpus COSMIANU (Corpus Of Social Media Italian Annotated with Nominal Utterances), which could be used to train automatic systems.Gli enunciati nominali sono un fenomento linguistico molto frequente, specialmente nello scritto dei social media, e di cruciale importanza, data la loro alta densità semantica. Tuttavia, ben poca attenzione è stata dedicata al loro riconoscimento automatico. In quest’ottica, questo lavoro illustra le guidelines per l’annotazione manuale degli enunciati nominali da noi sviluppate e presenta il corpus dell’italiano dei social media da noi annotato con gli enunciati nominali (COSMIANU), utilizzabile per addestrare sistemi automatici

The C-ORAL-ROM CORPUS. A Multilingual Resource of Spontaneous Speech for Romance Languages

International audienceno abstrac

Bootstrapping Information from Corpora in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective

The achievements of Romance language corpus-driven studies deserve more attention from the scientific community at the world level for both their quantity and quality. This book contains papers given at the 3rd International LABLITA Workshop in Corpus Linguistics (Italian Department, University of Florence, June 4th-5th 2008 ), and it aims at integrating new ideas and results derived from Romance language corpora in the framework of the overall achievements of Corpus Linguistics. The volume contains the contribution of a leading scholar of Corpus Linguistics (Douglas Biber), and a set of articles presented to Biber by notable European researchers and those from other countries. Papers report on long-term studies ranging from Italian to Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges