Gesture Theory is Linguistics: On Modelling Multimodality as Prosody

PACLIC 23 / City University of Hong Kong / 3-5 December 200

Close Copy Speech Synthesis for Speech Perception Testing

The present study is concerned with developing a speech synthesis subcomponent for perception testing in the context of evaluating cochlear implants in children. We provide a detailed requirements analysis, and develop a strategy for maximally high quality speech synthesis using Close Copy Speech synthesis techniques with a diphone based speech synthesiser, MBROLA. The close copy concept used in this work defines close copy as a function from a pair of speech signal recording and a phonemic annotation aligned with the recording into the pronunciation specification interface of the speech synthesiser. The design procedure has three phases: Manual Close Copy Speech (MCCS) synthesis as a ?best case gold standard?, in which the function is implemented manually as a preliminary step; Automatic Close Copy Speech (ACCS) synthesis, in which the steps taken in manual transformation are emulated by software; finally, Parametric Close Copy Speech (PCCS) synthesis, in which prosodic parameters are modifiable while retaining the diphones. This contribution reports on the MCCS and ACCS synthesis phases

Enhancing speech corpus resources with multiple lexical tag layers

We describe a general two-stage procedure for re-using a custom corpus for spoken language system development involving a transformation from character-based markup to XML, and DSSSL stylesheet-driven XML markup enhancement with multiple lexical tag trees. The procedure was used to generate a fully tagged corpus; alternatively with greater economy of computing resources, it can be employed as a parametrised ‘tagging on demand’ filter. The implementation will shortly be released as a public resource together with the corpus (German spoken dialogue, about 500k word form tokens) and lexicon (about 75k word form types)

Ein Synkretismusmodell für die deutsche Morphologie

Morphologische Modelle in der Computerlinguistik reflektieren typischerweise sprachspezifische Eigenschaften, indem sie Datenstrukturen und Operationen verwenden, die der Typologie einzelner Sprachen entsprechen. Ausgehend von einer Diskussion der synkretistischen Eigenschaften der deutschen Flexionsmorphologie wird eine generische denotationelle Semantik fur die bekannten sprachübergreifenden morphologischen Strukturen entwickelt. Diese Semantik liegt dem Konzept eines Compilers für ein generatives morphologisches Lexikon zugrunde, das 7000 Stämme aus einem Corpus spontan gesprochener deutscher Dialoge auf 30.000 Vollformen und 120.000 morphologische Kategorienabbildungen (nach Auflösung der Synkretismen) projiziert.Morphology models in computational linguistics have tended to be language-specific, in that the data structures and operations used have reflected the typology of individual languages. Starting with a discussion of the syncretistic properties of German inflectional morphology, a generic denotational semantics for known language-independent inflectional structures is outlined. This semantics underlies the design of a generative morphological lexicon compiler for spoken German, which projects 7000 stems extracted from a corpus of spoken language dialogues to 30,000 fully inflected forms and 120,000 morphological category mappings (after resolution of syncretism)

Acoustic-phonetic realisation of Polish syllable prominence: a corpus study.

Malisz Z, Wagner P. Acoustic-phonetic realisation of Polish syllable prominence: a corpus study. In: Gibbon D, Hirst D, Campbell N, eds. Rhythm, melody and harmony in speech. Studies in honour of Wiktor Jassem. Speech and Language Technology. Vol 14/15. Poznań, Poland; 2012: 105-114

Handbook of Technical Communication

International audienceThe handbook "Technical Communication" brings together a variety of topics which range from the role of technical media in human communication to the linguistic, multimodal enhancement of present-day technologies. It covers the area of computer-mediated text, voice and multimedia communication as well as of technical documentation. In doing so, the handbook takes professional and private communication into account. Special emphasis is put on technical communication based on digital technologies and its standardization in system development. In summary, the handbook deals with theoretical issues of technical communication and its practical impact on the development and usage of text and speech technologies