Text, Speech and Dialogue

Text, Speech and Dialogue

Author: Petr Sojka

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2010-08-30

Total Pages: 601

ISBN-13: 3642157599

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This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2010, held in Brno, Czech Republic, September 2010. The 71 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 144 submissions. The topics of the conference include, but are not limited to text corpora and tagging, transcription problems in spoken corpora, sense disambiguation, links between text and speech oriented systems, parsing issues, multi-lingual issues, information retrieval and information extraction, text/topic summarization, machine translation, semantic web, speech modeling, speech recognition, search in speech for IR and IE, text-to-speech synthesis, emotions and personality modeling, user modeling, knowledge representation in relation to dialogue systems, assistive technologies based on speech and dialogue, applied systems and software, facial animation, as well as visual speech synthesis.


Pitch Determination of Speech Signals

Pitch Determination of Speech Signals

Author: W. Hess

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 713

ISBN-13: 3642819265

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Pitch (i.e., fundamental frequency FO and fundamental period TO) occupies a key position in the acoustic speech signal. The prosodic information of an utterance is predominantly determined by this parameter. The ear is more sensitive to changes of fundamental frequency than to changes of other speech signal parameters by an order of magnitude. The quality of vocoded speech is essentially influenced by the quality and faultlessness of the pitch measure ment. Hence the importance of this parameter necessitates using good and reliable measurement methods. At first glance the task looks simple: one just has to detect the funda mental frequency or period of a quasi-periodic signal. For a number of reasons, however, the task of pitch determination has to be counted among the most difficult problems in speech analysis. 1) In principle, speech is a nonstationary process; the momentary position of the vocal tract may change abruptly at any time. This leads to drastic variations in the temporal structure of the signal, even between subsequent pitch periods, and assuming a quasi-periodic signal is often far from realistic. 2) Due to the flexibility of the human vocal tract and the wide variety of voices, there exist a multitude of possible temporal structures. Narrow-band formants at low harmonics (especially at the second or third harmonic) are an additional source of difficulty. 3) For an arbitrary speech signal uttered by an unknown speaker, the fundamental frequency can vary over a range of almost four octaves (50 to 800 Hz).