Comparison of forced-alignment speech recognition and humans for generating reference VAD

This present paper aims to answer the question whether forced-alignment speech recognition can be used as an alternative to humans in generating reference Voice Activity Detection (VAD) transcriptions. An investigation of the level of agreement between automatic/manual VAD transcriptions and the reference ones produced by a human expert was carried out. Thereafter, statistical analysis was employed on the automatically produced and the collected manual transcriptions. Experimental results confirmed that forced-alignment speech recognition can provide accurate and consistent VAD labels.caslpub4422pu

A cross-lingual adaptation approach for rapid development of speech recognizers for learning disabled users

Building a voice-operated system for learning disabled users is a difficult task that requires a considerable amount of time and effort. Due to the wide spectrum of disabilities and their different related phonopathies, most approaches available are targeted to a specific pathology. This may improve their accuracy for some users, but makes them unsuitable for others. In this paper, we present a cross-lingual approach to adapt a general-purpose modular speech recognizer for learning disabled people. The main advantage of this approach is that it allows rapid and cost-effective development by taking the already built speech recognition engine and its modules, and utilizing existing resources for standard speech in different languages for the recognition of the users’ atypical voices. Although the recognizers built with the proposed technique obtain lower accuracy rates than those trained for specific pathologies, they can be used by a wide population and developed more rapidly, which makes it possible to design various types of speech-based applications accessible to learning disabled users.This research was supported by the project ‘Favoreciendo la vida autónoma de discapacitados intelectuales con problemas de comunicación oral mediante interfaces personalizados de reconocimiento automático del habla’, financed by the Centre of Initiatives for Development Cooperation (Centro de Iniciativas de Cooperación al Desarrollo, CICODE), University of Granada, Spain. This research was supported by the Student Grant Scheme 2014 (SGS) at the Technical University of Liberec

Analysis and Synthesis of Glottalization Phenomena in German-Accented English

Springer International Publishing SwitzerlandThe present paper investigates the analysis and synthesis of glottalization phenomena in German-accented English. Word-initial glottalization was manually annotated in a subset of a German-accented English speech corpus. For each glottalized segment, time-normalized F0 and log-energy contours were produced and principal component analysis was performed on the contour sets in order to reduce their dimensionality. Centroid contours of the PC clusters were used for contour reconstruction in the resynthesis experiments. The prototype intonation and intensity contours were superimposed over non-glottalized word-initial vowels in order to resynthesize creaky voice. This procedure allows the automatic creation of speech stimuli which could be used in perceptual experiments for basic research on glottalizations.casl8773pub4420pu