Using same-language machine translation to create alternative target sequences for text-to-speech synthesis

Modern speech synthesis systems attempt to produce speech utterances from an open domain of words. In some situations, the synthesiser will not have the appropriate units to pronounce some words or phrases accurately but it still must attempt to pronounce them. This paper presents a hybrid machine translation and unit selection speech synthesis system. The machine translation system was trained with English as the source and target language. Rather than the synthesiser only saying the input text as would happen in conventional synthesis systems, the synthesiser may say an alternative utterance with the same meaning. This method allows the synthesiser to overcome the problem of insufficient units in runtime

Labour\u27s love lost: Observations on the historiography of class and ethnicity in the nineteenth Century

During the last thirty years, American labor and ethnic historiography, generally relying on pioneers like E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, interpreted the 19th-century industrial experiences of the working classes and ethnic groups by explaining how such groups fashioned their own, separate, subcultures. Such scholarship idealized workers, minimized the primacy of industrial capitalism and its power to shape society according to capitalist ideologies, and ignored worker unrest that flared sporadically into violence. This unrest was never driven sufficiently by social class solidarity and ethnic consciousness that an autonomous subculture could root in those circles

Making Common Causes: Crises, Conflict, Creation, Conversations: Offerings from the Biennial ALECC Conference Queen’s University, Kingston 2016

At ALECC’s biennial gathering at Queen’s University in June 2016, participants came together to explore the possibilities of “making common causes” from a host of angles, yet all were anchored in an acknowledgement of the diverse more-than-human relationships that make up our common worlds. The following collection of short essays, authored by some of the gathering’s keynote speakers, explores specific aspects of making common causes. In this special section of The Goose, we deliberately invoke the plural of conversation. We understand the effort to make common causes as a process, rather than a “one and done” act. It is multifaceted and messy; it invites imagination and critique. Most importantly, it needs to cultivate the common ground whereupon these difficult conversations can be engaged