Text-to-intonation in spontaneous Swedish

This paper deals with a number of aspects of intonation in spontaneous dialogues in a language technology perspective. The key topics to be addressed are: I) the analysis of global intonation and its interaction with textual structure, II) the implementation of global and textual aspects of discourse intonation in an analysis-by-synthesis environment. We present models for the analyses of intonation and textual content in spontaneous conversations in Swedish. The models are implemented in a computational environment, making it possible to generate F0 contours, which can be imposed on a speech waveform using the PSOLA technique. The result is a text-to-intonation system, where textual and lexical analyses automatically generate hypothetical intonation contours, which can through resynthesis, and eventually be used in a text-to-speech system

Developing the modelling of Swedish prosody in spontaneous dialogue

The main goal of our current research is the development of the Swedish prosody model. In our analysis of discourse and dialogue intonation we are exploiting model-based resynthesis. By comparing synthesized default and fine-tuned pitch contours for dialogues under study we are able to isolate relevant intonation patterns. This analysis of intonation is related to an independent modelling of topic structure consisting of lexical-semantic analysis and text segmentation. Some results from our model-based acoustic analysis are presented, and the implementation in text-tospeech-synthesis is discussed. 1

Double-Detargeted Oncolytic Adenovirus Shows Replication Arrest in Liver Cells and Retains Neuroendocrine Cell Killing Ability

BACKGROUND: We have previously developed an oncolytic serotype 5 adenovirus (Ad5) with chromogranin-A (CgA) promoter-controlled E1A expression, Ad[CgA-E1A], with the intention to treat neuroendocrine tumors, including carcinoids. Since carcinoids tend to metastasize to the liver it is important to fully repress viral replication in hepatocytes to avoid adenovirus-related liver toxicity. Herein, we explore miRNA-based regulation of E1A expression as a complementary mechanism to promoter-based transcriptional control. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Ad[CgA-E1A-miR122], where E1A expression is further controlled by six tandem repeats of the target sequence for the liver-specific miR122, was constructed and compared to Ad[CgA-E1A]. We observed E1A suppression and replication arrest of the miR122-detargeted adenovirus in normal hepatocytes, while the two viruses killed carcinoid cells to the same degree. Repeated intravenous injections of Ad[CgA-E1A] induced liver toxicity in mice while Ad[CgA-E1A-miR122] injections did not. Furthermore, a miR122-detargeted adenovirus with the wild-type E1A promoter showed reduced replication in hepatic cells compared to wild-type Ad5 but not to the same extent as the miR122-detargeted adenovirus with the neuroendocrine-selective CgA promoter. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: A combination of transcriptional (promoter) and post-transcriptional (miRNA target) regulation to control virus replication may allow for the use of higher doses of adenovirus for efficient tumors treatment without liver toxicity

Expressive Synthesis for Children, a Web-Based Evaluation

Prosodic features were varied in four sentences synthesised using a developmental version of the Infovox 330 concatenated diphone Swedish male voice. The sentences were part of an interactive evaluation test carried out on a commercial website for a period of three months. 78 girls and 56 boys between the ages of 5 and 15 rated the sentences on a qualitative four-point scale. Results indicate that both girls and boys interpret large-scale F0 manipulations as representing a fun voice while longer durations are generally regarded as boring, especially by the boys. The results also confirm the feasibility of using a website for remote evaluation even with children