This collection of comprehensive reviews describes the present knowledge of the enzyme mechanisms involved in the biodegradation of wood and wood components, cellulose, hemicelluloses and lignin by both fungi and bacteria. The extensive knowledge, presented in this volume, was developed in laboratories world-wide over the last few decades and constitutes the foundation for present and future biotechnology in the pulp and paper industry.
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.
The volume represents a state-of-the-art snapshot of the research on prosody for phoneticians, linguists and speech technologists. It covers well-known models and languages. How are prosodies linked to speech sounds? What are the relations between prosody and grammar? What does speech perception tell us about prosody, particularly about the constituting elements of intonation and rhythm? The papers of the volume address questions like these with a special focus on how the notion of context-based coding, the knowledge of prosodic functions and the communicative embedding of prosodic elements can advance our understanding of prosody.
Speech technology, the automatic processing of (spontaneously) spoken language, is now known to be technically feasible. It will become the major tool for handling the confusion of languages with applications including dictation systems, information retrieval by spoken dialog, and speech-to-speech translation. The book gives a throrough account of prosodic phenomena. The author presents in detail the mathematical and comnputational background of the algorithms and statistical models used and develops algorithms enabling the exploitation of prosodic information on various levels of speech understanding, such as syntax, semantics, dialog, and translation. Then he studies the integration of these algorithms in the speech-to-speech translation system VERBMOBIL and in the dialog system EVAR and analyzes the results.
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.
This volume deals with a wide range of topics including the representation of tones and intonation, evidence for and constraints on prosodic phrasing, prosodic boundary detection, articulatory dynamics of stress, timing in speech, and prosodic correlates of speaking style, as well as the perception of prosodic prominence. The book offers investigators in all areas of speech communication a comprehensive and coherent presentation of contemporary prosodic research.
This volume contains invited and contributed papers presented at the NATO Advanced study Insti tute on "Recent Advances in Speech Understanding and Dialog systems" held in Bad Windsheim, Federal Republic of Germany, July 5 to July 18, 1987. It is divided into the three parts Speech coding and Segmentation, Word Recognition, and Linguistic Processing. Although this can only be a rough organization showing some overlap, the editors felt that it most naturally represents the bottom-up strategy of speech understanding and, therefore, should be useful for the reader. Part 1, SPEECH CODING AND SEGMENTATION, contains 4 invited and 14 contributed papers. The first invited paper summarizes basic properties of speech signals, reviews coding schemes, and describes a particular solution which guarantees high speech quality at low data rates. The second and third invited papers are concerned with acoustic-phonetic decoding. Techniques to integrate knowledge sources into speech recognition systems are presented and demonstrated by experimental systems. The fourth invited paper gives an overview of approaches for using prosodic knowledge in automatic speech recogni tion systems, and a method for assigning a stress score to every syllable in an utterance of German speech is reported in a contributed paper. A set of contributed papers treats the problem of automatic segmentation, and several authors successfully apply knowledge-based methods for interpreting speech signals and spectrograms. The last three papers investigate phonetic models, Markov models and fuzzy quantization techniques and provide a transi tion to Part 2 .
This volume provides new insights into various issues on prosody in contact situations, contact referring here to the L2 acquisition process as well as to situations where two language systems may co-exist. A wide array of phenomena are dealt with (prosodic description of linguistic systems in contact situations, analysis of prosodic changes, language development processes, etc.), and the results obtained may give an indication of what is more or less stable in phonological and prosodic systems. In addition, the selected papers clearly show how languages may have influenced or may have been influenced by other language varieties (in multilingual situations where different languages are in constant contact with one another, but also in the process of L2 acquisition). Unlike previous volumes on related topics, which focus in general either on L2 acquisition or on the description and analyses of different varieties of a given language, this volume considers both topics in parallel, allowing comparison and discussion of the results, which may shed new light on more far-reaching theoretical questions such as the role of markedness in prosody and the causes of prosodic changes.
This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, written by leading experts from different disciplines. The volume's comprehensive coverage and multidisciplinary approach will make it an invaluable resource for all researchers, students, and practitioners interested in prosody.
