The Cerevoice Blizzard Entry 2007: Are Small Database Errors Worse than Compression Artifacts?

In commercial systems the memory footprint of unit selection systems is often a key issue. This is especially true for PDAs and other embedded devices. In this years Blizzard entry CereProc R○gave itself the criteria that the full database system entered would have a smaller memory footprint than either of the two smaller database entries. This was accomplished by applying speex speech compression to the full database entry. In turn a set of small database techniques used to improve the quality of small database systems in last years entry were extended. Finally, for all systems, two quality control methods were applied to the underlying database to improve the lexicon and transcription match to the underlying data. Results suggest that mild audio quality artifacts introduced by lossy compression have almost as much impact on MOS perceived quality as concatenation errors introduced by sparse data in the smaller systems with bulked diphones. Index Terms: speech synthesis, unit selection. 1

Automatic labeling of contrastive word pairs from spontaneous spoken English

This paper addresses the problem of automatically labeling contrast in spontaneous spoken speech, where contrast here is meant as a relation that ties two words that explicitly contrast with each other. Detection of contrast is certainly relevant in the analysis of discourse and information structure and also, because of the prosodic correlates of contrast, could play an important role in speech applications, such as text-to-speech synthesis, that need an accurate and discourse context related modeling of prosody. With this prospect we investigate the feasibility of automatic contrast labeling by training and evaluating on the Switchboard corpus a novel contrast tagger, based on Support Vector Machines (SVM), that combines lexical features, syntactic dependencies and WordNet semantic relations

Alternativas tecnológicas para el desarrollo sostenible de la producción láctea en áreas con distintos grados de restricciones edafoclimáticas del NE de la Provincia de Santa Fe.

El objetivo del trabajo, es disponer de información local respecto a las características de los sistemas lecheros y la calidad de la leche que se obtiene en el NE de la Provincia de Santa Fe, y desarrollar nuevas alternativas tecnológicas para mejorar la productividad e incrementar el valor agregado de los productos lácteos. Se relevó información (2013- 2015), sobre la dieta ofrecida al rodeo lechero, y se analizó la leche cruda para determinar el perfil de los ácidos grasos, en establecimientos de producción lechera ubicados: Norte del departamento San Justo, Sur del departamento Vera, departamento General Obligado, y Norte del departamento San Javier. Se seleccionaron cultivares de alfalfa con adaptación sitio específica, con ensayos en las localidades de Calchaquí y Vera y Pintado (departamentos Vera y San Justo). Se utilizó un diseño experimental de bloques completos aleatorizados con 4 repeticiones. Se implantaron 40 cultivares de alfalfa, pertenecientes a los grados de reposo invernal 6, 7, 8, 9 y 10. La variedad con mayor producción en Calchaquí (1° corte) fue Sirosal (4.135 kg MS/ha.) y en Vera y Pintado, variedad Brava GS (2.093 kg MS/ha.). En el 2do corte, la variedad de mayor producción en ambos sitios fue Brava GS, con 3.435 kg MS/ha. Calchaquí y 3.585 kg MS/ha. en Vera y Pintado. Los cultivares WL 1058, Trinidad 87, CW 194 Premium, ProINTA Monarca y WL 818 manifestaron una producción semejante en ambos ambientes, mientras que los cultivares Sirosal, WL 919, Aurora, Sardi, Pampa Flor, CW 809, P 30 y Verdor muestran elevada interacción genotipo x ambiente. Se observó que los productores adoptan las mismas pasturas y cultivos que la región pampeana, con menor productividad. Con producciones < 500 lts/día en promedio, 80% de los productores utilizan alfalfa y predomina el cultivo de sorgo tanto forrajero como granífero. Entre 1000 a 2000 lts/día, y >2000 lts/día, el 100% siembra alfalfa, y verdeos de maíz, sorgo forrajero y granífero, y moha. Con mayores escalas de producción (>1000 lts/día), aumenta el uso de silaje y de concentrados. Es bajo el porcentaje de utilización de semillas de algodón. El valor máximo obtenido de CLA en leche cruda de la zona de la cuenca pampeana corresponde a un valor de 1.41 mg/100g, mientras que en dicha zona se observa valor máximode CLA de 2.24 mg/100g.publishedVersio

The CSTR/Cereproc Blizzard Entry 2008: The Inconvenient Data

In a commercial system data used for unit selection systems is collected with a heavy emphasis on homogeneous neutral data that has sufficient coverage for the units that will be used in the system. In this years Blizzard entry CSTR and CereProc present a joint entry where the emphasis has been to explore techniques to deal with data which is not homogeneous (the English entry) and did not have appropriate coverage for a diphone based system (the Mandarin entry where tone/phone combinations were treated as distinct phone categories). In addition, two further problems were addressed, 1) Making use of non-homogeneous data for creating a voice that can realise both expressive and neutral speaking styles (the English entry) 2) Building a unit selection system with no native understanding of the language but depending instead on external native evaluation (the Mandarin Entry)

Glottal Source and Prosodic Prominence Modelling in HMM-based Speech Synthesis for the Blizzard Challenge 2009

This paper describes the CSTR entry for the Blizzard Challenge 2009. The work focused on modifying two parts of the Nitech 2005 HTS speech synthesis system to improve naturalness and contextual appropriateness. The first part incorporated an implementation of the Linjencrants-Fant (LF) glottal source model. The second part focused on improving synthesis of prosodic prominence including emphasis through context dependent phonemes. Emphasis was assigned to the synthesised test sentences based on a handful of theory based rules. The two parts (LF-model and prosodic prominence) were not combined and hence evaluated separately. The results on naturalness for the LF-model showed that it is not yet perceived as natural as the Benchmark HTS system for neutral speech. The results for the prosodic prominence modelling showed that it was perceived as contextually appropriate as the Benchmark HTS system, despite a low naturalness score. The Blizzard challenge evaluation has provided valuable information on the status of our work and continued work will begin with analysing why our modifications resulted in reduced naturalness compared to the Benchmark HTS system

A Rotating Collapsar and Possible Interpretation of the LSD Neutrino Signal from SN 1987A

We consider an improved rotational mechanism of the explosion of a collapsing supernova. We show that this mechanism leads to two-stage collapse with a phase difference of \sim 5 h. Based on this model, we attempt a new interpretation of the events in underground neutrino detectors on February 23, 1987, related to the supernova SN 1987A.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, 9 table