Distinction between 'normal' and 'contrastive/emphatic' focus

A method to extract and classify focus accents has been developed. It works for German spontaneous speech. The method tries to distinguish 'normal' and 'contrastive/emphatic' focus accents using phrase boundaries. It was found that contrasive/emphatic accents tend to have greater distances to phrase boundaries than normal focus accents. Moreover, for constrastive/emphatic accents with a rather high distance from the next phrase boundary. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(167)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

Detection of accents, phrase boundaries, and sentence modality in German

In this paper detectors for accents, phrase boundaries, and sentence modality are described which derive prosodic features only from the speech signal and its fundamental frequency to support other modules of a speech understanding system in an early analysis stage, or in cases where no word hypotheses are available. A new method for interpolating and decomposing the fundamental frequency is suggested. The detectors' underlying Gaussian distribution classifiers were trained and tested with approximately 50 minutes of spontaneous speech, yielding recognition rates of 78 percent for accents, 18 percent for phrase boundaries, and 85 percent for sentence modality. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(96)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

Strategies for focal accent detection in spontaneous speech

In this paper a new method for detection of focus is developed. Speech data consists of German spontaneous speech from several speakers. At present the algorithm uses only the fundamental frequency values. By computing a nonlinear reference line through significant anchor points in the F_0 course, points of highest prominence are determined. The global recognition rate is 78.5% and the mean recognition rate is 66.6%. (orig.)Also published in: Proc. 13. ICPhS, Stockholm (SE), v. 3(1995), p. 672-675Available from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(166)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEBundesministerium fuer Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

'Where and when?' Aussprache, Dialogverhalten und andere linguistische Phaenomene deutscher Sprecher in englischsprachigen Dialogen zur VERBMOBIL-Terminabsprache

In an experimental study, 22 English dialogues of German speakers have been recorded and analyzed with regard to dialogue structure (break, hesitation, fragmentary sentences, corrections), syntactic constructions, lexical applications, grammar of date formulation and phonetics. Results of these analyses are a basis for future classification and labelling of dialogues for fixing appointments in the frame of the Verbmobil project. It is pointed out that non-grammatical phenomena are much more numerous and complex than in German dialogues and have to be considered in further linguistic analyses. (WEN)Available from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(56)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEBundesministerium fuer Forschung und Technologie (BMFT), Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

Final report for Verbmobil. Subproject 4.4: english synthesis

SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(195)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

Neuere Entwicklungen in der Sprachsynthese

SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(174)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

A framework to evaluate and verify the presence of linguistic concepts in the prosody of spoken utterances

SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(177)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

Synthesizing prosody: a prominence-based approach

A method for generating acoustic prosody is presented that starts from a very simple symbolic input. We present evidence that prominence is a central factor influencing both perception and acoustic parameters. Results of statistical analysis of a large speech corpus are shown, these results have led to the development of a rule system that predicts fundamental frequency and syllable duration. Besides the prominence of syllables and boundaries, position, context and syllable structure are considered by these rules. Finally, the outcome of two evaluation experiments is presented. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(176)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

What's in the 'pure' prosody?

Detectors for accents and phrase boundaries have been developed which derive prosodic features from the speech signal and its fundamental frequency to support other modules of a speech understanding system in an early analysis stage, or in cases where no word hypotheses are available. The detectors' underlying Gaussian distribution classifiers were trained with 50 minutes and tested with 30 minutes of spontaneous speech, yielding recognition rates of 74% for accents and 86% for phrase boundaries. Since this material was prosodically hand labelled, the question was, which labels for phrase boundaries and accentuation were only guided by syntactic or semantic knowledge, and which ones are really prosodically marked. Therefore a small test subset has been resynthesized in such a way that comprehensibility was lost, but the prosodic characteristics were kept. This subset has been re-labelled by 11 listeners with nearly the same accuracy as the detectors. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(168)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

A mixed inventory structure for German concatenative synthesis

In speech synthesis by unit concatenation a major point is the definition of the unit inventory. Diphone or demisyllable inventories are widely used but both unit types have their drawbacks. This paper describes a mixed inventory structure which is syllable oriented but does not demand a definite decision about the position of a syllable boundary. In the definition process of the inventory the results of a comprehensive investigation of coarticulatory phenomena at syllable boundaries were used as well as a machine readable pronunciation dictionary. An evaluation comparing the mixed inventory with a demisyllable and a diphone inventory confirms that speech generated with the mixed inventory is superior regarding general acceptance. A segmental intelligibility test shows the high intelligibility of the synthetic speech. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(149)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman