ACOUSTIC BUILDING UNITS FOR FORMANT SYNTHESIS TEXT-TO-SPEECH CONVERTER SYSTEM FOR MODERN STANDARD ARABIC

In this paper an inventory of acoustic building units (ABUs) used for the synthesis of Arabic speech is presented. The ABUs are generated for the free programmable PCF-8200 formant synthesizer chip which has been used in the development of the real time text-to-speech multilingual system, the MULTIVOX. To utilize these ABUs for the synthesis of Arabic speech a set of 36 Arabic sounds and all their possible combinations are defined. The inventory of 255 ABUs is designed that each sound combination can be built up by using some of those ABUs. A grapheme-to-phone-code converter is designed so to convert the written input text into its equivalent phone-codes. Furthermore, it contains solutions for the difficult phonetic problems in the Arabic input text

DATA-BASE RULE-SYSTEM FOR THE MULTIVOX TEXT-TO-SPEECH CONVERTER APPLICATION FOR ARABIC LANGUAGE

The MULTIVOX-Multilingual text-to-speech converter system is adapted to Modern Standard Arabic. In this system, Arabic speech is generated from the concatenation of a set of acoustic building units (ABUs). A 3-dimensional data-base rule-system for the synthesis of unlimited vocabulary Arabic text is organized to concatenate the appropri- ate ABUs for all possible phone-code pairs that may exist in the input text. The main functions of the MULTIVOX are explained. Illustrative examples are given to show the conversion of Arabic graphemes into phone-codes and the use of the data-base rule-system in the concatenation of the ABUs. Hearing tests have been carried out to test the quality of the synthesized speech

Multiple-clause constituent questions: intonation and variation in Hungarian

When a question phrase bears a grammatical function in a subordinate clause but the interrogativity it introduces extends over a higher clause, there are two main possibilities in Hungarian: (i) the question phrase appears preverbally in the clause over which it takes scope, or (ii) the question phrase appears in the subordinate clause while the scope of interrogativity is indicated by the presence of another question phrase in the higher clause (the scope-marking construction). In order to understand the features shared by these two types of question and the ways in which they differ, this article explores the intonation of these types of multiple-clause constituent questions in Hungarian. The results of experimental investigation are reported and discussed, and the significance of these findings is evaluated in the context of wider typological variation in the formation of multiple-clause constituent questions

Anticipatory coarticulation in Hungarian VnC sequences

The duration of the vowel and the nasal was analyzed in the casual pronunciation of Hungarian words containing the sequence V n .C, where ‘.’ is a syllable boundary and C is a stop, affricate, fricative, or approximant. It was found that due to anticipatory coarticulation the duration of n is significantly shorter before fricatives and approximants than before stops and affricates.A teaching algorithm was used to distinguish between stops/affricates and fricatives/approximants in V n C sequences. We used an approach to the classification of C by means of the support vector machine (SVM) and the properties of Radial basis function (RBF) kernel (using MATLAB, version 7.0). The results show close to 95% correct responses for the stop/affricate vs. fricative/approximant distinction of C, as opposed to about 60% correct responses for the classification of the voicing feature of C