Concept-to-Speech (CTS) systems, which aim to synthesize speech from semantic information and discourse context, have succeeded in producing more appropriate and naturalsounding prosody than text-to-speech (TTS) systems, which rely mostly on syntactic and orthographic information. In this paper, we show how recent advances in CTS systems can be used to improve intonation in text reading systems...

The FK text-to-speech prosody rules for Swedish are outlined. They cover all levels including prosodic grouping from syntactical analysis. It is a superposition system with local accentuations superimposed on modular F0 patterns of specific rise and decay patterns in successive prosodic groups. F0 in semitones and segmental durations are calculated as a function of lexically determined prominen...

In this paper we examine different approaches to obtain judgments of perceptual prominence. It discusses the use of different scales, the influence of the linguistic level on which the prominence is rated and the normalisation of prominence judgments. We propose the use of a multilevel scale to obtain prominence judgments. It seems that naı̈ve listeners can rate word prominence better than sylla...

We analyze the recent phenomenon termed a Link Bomb, and investigate the optimal attack pattern for a group of web pages attempting to link bomb a specific web page. The typical modus operandi of a link bomb is to associate a particular page with a search text and then boost that page’s pagerank. (The attacking pages can only control their own content and outgoing links.) Thus, when a search is...

We address the problem of identification (from text) and generation of pitch accents in HMM-based English TTS synthesis. We show, through a large scale perceptual test, that a large improvement of the binary discrimination between pitch accented and non-accented words has no effect on the quality of the speech generated by the system. On the other side adding a third accent type that emphatical...

In the commercial use of picture collections, a heavy dependency continues to be exhibited on a concept-based image retrieval paradigm in which the query is verbalised by the client and resolved as a metadata text-matching operation. The practical and philosophical challenges posed by the indexing aspect of image metadata construction are significant and frequently expressed. Nevertheless, it h...

The present paper addresses the problem of prosody assignment in the context of a system for text-to-speech conversion of Swedish. The question of what type of textual analysis is needed for prosodic purposes is discussed and the use of Dependency Graphs to this end is proposed. It is argued that this type of analysis provides sufficient syntactic information so that prosodic phrasing and promi...

We present AIDA, a framework and online tool for entity detection and disambiguation. Given a natural-language text or a Web table, we map mentions of ambiguous names onto canonical entities like people or places, registered in a knowledge base like DBpedia, Freebase, or YAGO. AIDA is a robust framework centred around collective disambiguation exploiting the prominence of entities, similarity b...