Speech Synthesis
Speech Synthesis is the process of synthesizing speech from some sort of symbolic linguistic representation. Text to speech synthesis systems can be divided into two broad categories. They are:
Rule-based techniques.
Data-driven approach
They are discussed in details in the following subsections.
Rule-based techniques
Rule-based techniques try to synthesize speech using a fixed set of rigid rules mostly related to how vocal system acts during the production of specific phonemes. They do not usually use human data. The major two rule-based techniques are:
Formant Synthesis.
Articulatory Synthesis.
Formant Synthesis
This was a widely popular technique in the 1980s. In formant synthesis, speech is treated as
Here, instead of storing individual phoneme sounds and mapping them to the phonemes found in the text, parametric models for phonemes in different contexts are saved. The simplest way to describe statistical parametric speech synthesis would be something like this: it generates the average of some set of similarly sounding speech segments. [7]
Here, actually, speech is decomposed into parameters like acoustic features such as fundamental frequency, the shape of the waveform, aperiodic energy etc and duration features related to contextual prosody. And the text is decomposed into various linguistic information. Then Hidden Markov Model or Deep Neural Networks can be used who will learn how to predict parameters such as acoustic features and duration features from the linguistic information of text data during the training phase. [8]
How Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis Works At first, the text is broken down into phonemes and individual linguistic representation for each phoneme is created. The linguistic representation of a phoneme contains the phoneme itself and some information about its prosody in the current context. Then from each of the linguistic representation, some parameters are generated by models which are later used to synthesize speech. More discussion about linguistic representation is done in section
Session #1: The speech language pathologist (SLP) modeled and role-played different types of voice tone. According to Jed Baker (2003), when demonstrat...
Seikel, J. A., King, D. W., & Drumright, D. G. (2010). 12. Anatomy & physiology for speech,
not the basic rules of spelling. A rule based strategy must be taught to learning
Establishment consisted of teaching the children correct placement of articulators to produce the targeted speech sound across all word positions. The randomized-variable practice began once the child could produce the sound 80% of the time in certain syllables. It usually took children 1-5 sessions to complete the establishment phase. Random teaching tasks such as imitated single syllables, imitated single words, nonimitated single words, imitated two-to-four word phrases, nonimitated two-to-four word phrases, imitated sentences, nonimitated sentences, and storytelling or conversations were selected in the second phase. Participants remained in this phase until they obtained 80% mastery across two
the substitution of real syllables and nonsense words in the place of an instrument. Many
Style has been an integral component in the field of linguistics. Linguistic style refers to a person’s speaking pattern, which can include different features such as pace, pitch, intonation, syntactic patterns, etc. Styles of speech is learned, and is often influenced by location, gender, ethnicity, and age. As different cultures and sub-cultures arise, linguistic variations occur and different sociolinguistic styles come into being. Each style can index social meanings such as group membership, personal attributes or beliefs.
Delgado, R & Kobayashi, T 2011. Proceedings of the Paralinguistic Information and its Integration in Spoken Dialogue Systems Workshop. 1st ed. Springer.
The other part of computational linguistics is called applied computational linguistics which focuses on the practical outcome of modeling human language use. The methods, techniques, tools, and applications in this area are often subsumed under the term language engineering or (human language technology. The current computational linguistic systems are far from achieving human ability of communicating they have numerous applications. The goal for this is to eventually have a computer program that will have the same communication skills as a human being. Once this is achieved it will open doors never thought possible in computing. After all the major problem today with computing is communication with the computer. Today’s computers don’t really understand our language and it is very difficult to learn computer language, plus computer language doesn’t correspond to the structure of human thought.
Wyse, D. and Goswami, U. (2008) Synthetic phonics and the teaching of reading, British Educational Research Journal, 34 (6), pp.691-710
... role of infant-directed speech with a computer model. Acoustical Society of America, 4(4), 129-134.
The fact that voice stress analysis relies on eye comparison is a big problem. Another problem involves the variation that occurs in the same speaker. It is reported that the uttering of the same sentence a hundred times in quick succession does not produce any two identical uttering. Some countries like the United Kingdom, however, prefer auditory analysis as opposed to the acoustic method. In auditory analysis, the speech samples are phonetically transcribed. This analysis is important as it allows the analysts to identify such features that are idiosyncratic like the speech impediments and the unusual realization of phonemes. Besides, the analysts might find the need to profile the social and regional identity of the speaker. Speech analysis nowadays accepts the mixed method as the most accurate and reliable. It can found its application in situat...
Lubinski R. 2010. Speech Therapy or Speech-Language Pathology. In: JH Stone, M Blouin, editors. International Encyclopedia of Rehabilitation. Available online: http://cirrie.buffalo.edu/encyclopedia/en/article/333/
Jurafsky, D. & Martin, J. H. (2009), Speech and Language Processing: International Version: an Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, 2nd ed, Pearson Education Inc, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
Speech sounds can be defined as those that belong to a language and convey meaning. While the distinction of such sounds from other auditory stimuli such as the slamming of a door comes easily, it is not immediately clear why this should be the case. It was initially thought that speech was processed in a phoneme-by-phoneme fashion; however, this theory became discredited due to the development of technology that produces spectrograms of speech. Research using spectrograms in an attempt to identify invariant features of formant frequency patterns for each phoneme have revealed several problems with this theory, including a lack of invariance in phoneme production, assimilation of phonemes, and the segmentation problem. An alternative theory was developed based on evidence of categorical perception of phonemes: Liberman’s Motor Theory of Speech Perception rests on the postulation that speech sounds are recognised through identification of how the sounds are produced. He proposed that as well as a general auditory processing module there is a separate module for speech recognition, which makes use of an internal model of articulatory gestures. However, while this theory initially appeared to account for some of the features of speech perception, it has since been subject to major criticism, and other models have been put forward, such as Massaro’s fuzzy logic model of perception.
A great deal of research on standard dictation have been carried out in the past several decades across the world. These research