Collapsed speech segment detection and suppression for WaveNet vocoder

In this paper, we propose a technique to alleviate the quality degradation caused by collapsed speech segments sometimes generated by the WaveNet vocoder. The effectiveness of the WaveNet vocoder for generating natural speech from acoustic features has been proved in recent works. However, it sometimes generates very noisy speech with collapsed speech segments when only a limited amount of training data is available or significant acoustic mismatches exist between the training and testing data. Such a limitation on the corpus and limited ability of the model can easily occur in some speech generation applications, such as voice conversion and speech enhancement. To address this problem, we propose a technique to automatically detect collapsed speech segments. Moreover, to refine the detected segments, we also propose a waveform generation technique for WaveNet using a linear predictive coding constraint. Verification and subjective tests are conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. The verification results indicate that the detection technique can detect most collapsed segments. The subjective evaluations of voice conversion demonstrate that the generation technique significantly improves the speech quality while maintaining the same speaker similarity.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures. Proc. Interspeech, 201

Organizational Justice for Managing Human Resources

To achieve a truly fair way of managing people in organizations and increase organizational competitiveness, designing procedures and structures of human resource management systems appropriately is not sufficient. What are needed in advance are top management's moral or ethical aspirations for justice and the establishment of justice climate based on such a moral concern. This argument is supported academically by the recent advancement of the research on organizational justice, especially the advancement of the understanding of justice motives from instrumental and social to moral perspectives, and the development of the macro-level justice climate construct.organizational justice, human resource management, moral concerns, justice climate

Dilatonic Inflation and SUSY Breaking in String-inspired Supergravity

The theory of inflation will be investigated as well as supersymmetry breaking in the context of supergravity, incorporating the target-space duality and the nonperturbative gaugino condensation in the hidden sector. We found an inflationary trajectory of a dilaton field and a condensate field which breaks supersymmetry at once. The model satisfies the slow-roll condition which solves the eta-problem. When the particle rolls down along the minimized trajectory of the potential V(S,Y) at a duality invariant point of T=1, we can obtain the e-fold value \sim 57. And then the cosmological parameters obtained from our model well match the recent WMAP data combined with other experiments. This observation suggests one to consider the string-inspired supergravity as a fundamental theory of the evolution of the universe as well as the particle theory.Comment: 10 pages, 4 eps figures. Typos and references corrected. Final version to appear in Mod. Phys. Lett.

Asymptotic degeneracies of M2-brane SCFTs

We study the asymptotic growth of the degeneracy of the BPS local operators with scaling dimension $n/2$ in the three-dimensional superconformal field theories describing $N$ M2-branes. From the large $N$ supersymmetric indices we obtain the asymptotic formulas for degeneracies of the M2-brane SCFTs according to the Meinardus theorem. We observe an intriguing universal $n^{2/3}$ growth of the degeneracies in various theories of M2-brane SCFTs. We also determine the coefficients of $n^{2/3}$ growth as well as further corrections in these theories explicitly.Comment: 59 page