This updated book expands upon prosody for recognition applications of speech processing. It includes importance of prosody for speech processing applications; builds on why prosody needs to be incorporated in speech processing applications; and presents methods for extraction and representation of prosody for applications such as speaker recognition, language recognition and speech recognition. The updated book also includes information on the significance of prosody for emotion recognition and various prosody-based approaches for automatic emotion recognition from speech.
Speech and language technologies continue to grow in importance as they are used to create natural and efficient interfaces between people and machines, and to automatically transcribe, extract, analyze, and route information from high-volume streams of spoken and written information. The workshops on Mathematical Foundations of Speech Processing and Natural Language Modeling were held in the Fall of 2000 at the University of Minnesota's NSF-sponsored Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, as part of a "Mathematics in Multimedia" year-long program. Each workshop brought together researchers in the respective technologies on the one hand, and mathematicians and statisticians on the other hand, for an intensive week of cross-fertilization. There is a long history of benefit from introducing mathematical techniques and ideas to speech and language technologies. Examples include the source-channel paradigm, hidden Markov models, decision trees, exponential models and formal languages theory. It is likely that new mathematical techniques, or novel applications of existing techniques, will once again prove pivotal for moving the field forward. This volume consists of original contributions presented by participants during the two workshops. Topics include language modeling, prosody, acoustic-phonetic modeling, and statistical methodology.
Waibel, (computer science, Carnegie-Mellon U.), focuses on the prosodic cues (e.g., pitch, intensity, rhythm, temporal relationships, stress) that are critical to human speech perception. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The volume addresses issues concerning prosody generation in speech synthesis, including prosody modeling, how we can convey para- and non-linguistic information in speech synthesis, and prosody control in speech synthesis (including prosody conversions). A high level of quality has already been achieved in speech synthesis by using selection-based methods with segments of human speech. Although the method enables synthetic speech with various voice qualities and speaking styles, it requires large speech corpora with targeted quality and style. Accordingly, speech conversion techniques are now of growing interest among researchers. HMM/GMM-based methods are widely used, but entail several major problems when viewed from the prosody perspective; prosodic features cover a wider time span than segmental features and their frame-by-frame processing is not always appropriate. The book offers a good overview of state-of-the-art studies on prosody in speech synthesis.
Extraction and Representation of Prosodic Features for Speech Processing Applications deals with prosody from speech processing point of view with topics including: The significance of prosody for speech processing applications Why prosody need to be incorporated in speech processing applications Different methods for extraction and representation of prosody for applications such as speech synthesis, speaker recognition, language recognition and speech recognition This book is for researchers and students at the graduate level.
Robust Speech Recognition in Embedded Systems and PC Applications provides a link between the technology and the application worlds. As speech recognition technology is now good enough for a number of applications and the core technology is well established around hidden Markov models many of the differences between systems found in the field are related to implementation variants. We distinguish between embedded systems and PC-based applications. Embedded applications are usually cost sensitive and require very simple and optimized methods to be viable. Robust Speech Recognition in Embedded Systems and PC Applications reviews the problems of robust speech recognition, summarizes the current state of the art of robust speech recognition while providing some perspectives, and goes over the complementary technologies that are necessary to build an application, such as dialog and user interface technologies. Robust Speech Recognition in Embedded Systems and PC Applications is divided into five chapters. The first one reviews the main difficulties encountered in automatic speech recognition when the type of communication is unknown. The second chapter focuses on environment-independent/adaptive speech recognition approaches and on the mainstream methods applicable to noise robust speech recognition. The third chapter discusses several critical technologies that contribute to making an application usable. It also provides some design recommendations on how to design prompts, generate user feedback and develop speech user interfaces. The fourth chapter reviews several techniques that are particularly useful for embedded systems or to decrease computational complexity. It also presents some case studies for embedded applications and PC-based systems. Finally, the fifth chapter provides a future outlook for robust speech recognition, emphasizing the areas that the author sees as the most promising for the future. Robust Speech Recognition in Embedded Systems and PC Applications serves as a valuable reference and although not intended as a formal University textbook, contains some material that can be used for a course at the graduate or undergraduate level. It is a good complement for the book entitled Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition: Fundamentals and Applications co-authored by the same author.
This volume and its companion volume LNAI 4441 constitute a state-of-the-art survey in the field of speaker classification. Together they address such intriguing issues as how speaker characteristics are manifested in voice and speaking behavior. The nineteen contributions in this volume are organized into topical sections covering fundamentals, characteristics, applications, methods, and evaluation.
Tanja Schultz and Katrin Kirchhoff have compiled a comprehensive overview of speech processing from a multilingual perspective. By taking this all-inclusive approach to speech processing, the editors have included theories, algorithms, and techniques that are required to support spoken input and output in a large variety of languages. Multilingual Speech Processing presents a comprehensive introduction to research problems and solutions, both from a theoretical as well as a practical perspective, and highlights technology that incorporates the increasing necessity for multilingual applications in our global community. Current challenges of speech processing and the feasibility of sharing data and system components across different languages guide contributors in their discussions of trends, prognoses and open research issues. This includes automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis, but also speech-to-speech translation, dialog systems, automatic language identification, and handling non-native speech. The book is complemented by an overview of multilingual resources, important research trends, and actual speech processing systems that are being deployed in multilingual human-human and human-machine interfaces. Researchers and developers in industry and academia with different backgrounds but a common interest in multilingual speech processing will find an excellent overview of research problems and solutions detailed from theoretical and practical perspectives. - State-of-the-art research with a global perspective by authors from the USA, Asia, Europe, and South Africa - The only comprehensive introduction to multilingual speech processing currently available - Detailed presentation of technological advances integral to security, financial, cellular and commercial applications
This book presents a collection of papers from the Spring 1995 Work shop on Computational Approaches to Processing the Prosody of Spon taneous Speech, hosted by the ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Re search Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan. The workshop brought together lead ing researchers in the fields of speech and signal processing, electrical en gineering, psychology, and linguistics, to discuss aspects of spontaneous speech prosody and to suggest approaches to its computational analysis and modelling. The book is divided into four sections. Part I gives an overview and theoretical background to the nature of spontaneous speech, differentiating it from the lab-speech that has been the focus of so many earlier analyses. Part II focuses on the prosodic features of discourse and the structure of the spoken message, Part ilIon the generation and modelling of prosody for computer speech synthesis. Part IV discusses how prosodic information can be used in the context of automatic speech recognition. Each section of the book starts with an invited overview paper to situate the chapters in the context of current research. We feel that this collection of papers offers interesting insights into the scope and nature of the problems concerned with the computational analysis and modelling of real spontaneous speech, and expect that these works will not only form the basis of further developments in each field but also merge to form an integrated computational model of prosody for a better understanding of human processing of the complex interactions of the speech chain.
Verbmobil is the result of eight years of intensive research in a large speech-to-speech translation project, executed by a consortium comprising nineteen academic and four industrial partners. The system that was developed by more than 100 researchers and engineers handles dialogs in three business-oriented domains, with translation between three languages: German, English, and Japanese. Verbmobil deals with spontaneous speech, which includes realistic repair phenomena, and uses deep semantic analysis to recognize a speaker's slips and to translate what he tried to say rather than what he actually said. - This book gives the first comprehensive overview of the results of this unique and seminal project in human language technology. Contributions by leading scientists in speech and language technology look at the component technologies that make Verbmobil the most advanced speech-to-speech translation system worldwide and a landmark project in the history of natural language processing.
