Microphone arrays are widely used to detect, locate, and track a stationary or moving speaker. The first step is to estimate the time delay, between the speech signals received by a pair of microphones. Conventional methods like generalized crosscorrelation are based on the spectral content of the vocal tract system in the speech signal. The spectral content of the speech signal is affected due...

In this paper, we discuss an automatic event-based recognition system (EBS) that is based on phonetic feature theory and acoustic phonetics. First, acoustic events related to the manner phonetic features are extracted from the speech signal. Second, based on the manner acoustic events, information related to the place phonetic features and voicing are extracted. Most recently, we focused on pla...

We introduce a new method for computing join cost in unitselection speech synthesis which uses a linear dynamical model (also known as a Kalman filter) to model line spectral frequency trajectories. The model uses an underlying subspace in which it makes smooth, continuous trajectories. This subspace can be seen as an analogy for underlying articulator movement. Once trained, the model can be u...

This paper describes a method for creating an evaluation measure for discourse understanding in spoken dialogue systems. Discourse understanding means utterance understanding taking the context into account. Since the measure needs to be determined based on its correlation with the system’s performance, conventional measures, such as the concept error rate, cannot be easily applied. Using the m...

We show the perception of Canadian French (CF) vowels by Canadian English (CE) listeners and test a cue-weighting hypothesis to explain the attested assimilation patterns. Five CF vowels, /i, y, u, , æ/, and three allophonic variants, [, , ], were examined. The listeners completed a native-language identification task with goodness of fit judgments. We found that most French vowels were ide...

In this paper we present a voicing controlled, speech parameter based frame loss concealment for frames that have been encoded with the Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) speech codec. The missing parameters are estimated by interpolation and extrapolation techniques that are chosen in dependence of the voicing state of the speech frames preceding and following the lost frames. The voicing controlled co...

Data-centric applications are still a challenging issue for large scale distributed computing systems. The emergence of new protocols and software for collaborative content distribution over Internet offers a new opportunity for efficient and fast delivery of high volume of data. In a previous paper, we have investigated BitTorrent as a protocol for data diffusion in the context of Computationa...