The speech enhancement techniques are often employed to improve the quality and intelligibility of the noisy speech signals. This paper discusses a novel technique for speech enhancement which is based on Singular Value Decomposition. This implementation utilizes a Genetic Algorithm based optimization method for reducing the effects of environmental noises from the singular vectors as well as t...

It has been well-recognized that the accent has a great impact on the ASR of Chinese Mandarin, therefore, how to improve the performance on the accented speech has become a critical issue in this field. The attribute feature has been proven effective on modelling accented speech, resulting in a significantly improved performance in accent recognition. In this paper, we propose an attribute-base...

This paper presents the generation module of the speech-to-speech dialogue translation system Verbmobil. Spontaneous speech, large multilingual vocabulary, difficulty of the translation task, robustness and real-time constraints make the design of such a module very challenging. In order to overcome these difficulties, we have developed a system based on a general kernel and the declarativity o...

Generally, phone recognition system contains only a single phone recognizer. The phone set and speech representation for a recognizer are optimized for a particular task. This paper studies the effect of phone sets and speech representations for TIMIT phone recognition task. Two phone sets (TIMIT original phone set and 39 classical phone set) and two speech representations (MFCC-based and PLP-b...

In this paper, an integrated framework for knowledge audit and capture using the task analysis approach is presented. We first identify the types of knowledge that could be ascribed to tasks and analyze a task by breaking it down into subtasks and task elements. We then identify the skills and knowledge required to perform the tasks at this level. The framework is validated and tested on an exp...

The purpose of this study was to develop a picture description task for eliciting connected speech from children with motor speech disorders. The Park Play scene is a child-friendly picture description task aimed at augmenting current assessment protocols for childhood motor speech disorders. The design process included a literature review to: (1) establish optimal design features for child ass...

The speech enhancement techniques are often employed to improve the quality and intelligibility of the noisy speech signals. This paper discusses a novel technique for speech enhancement which is based on Singular Value Decomposition. This implementation utilizes a Genetic Algorithm based optimization method for reducing the effects of environmental noises from the singular vectors as well as t...

This paper describes some of the ongoing work carried out within the NLP group of Otago University for speech synthesis from diphone audio databases which are prepared from human voice recording. A speech synthesis system based on such databases claims to have human level performance provided enough descriptions are given to extract and manipulate voice data. Based on the software provided by t...