Dialogue protocols have been the subject of considerable attention with respect to their potential applications in multiagent system environments. Formalisations of such protocols define classes of dialogue locutions, concepts of a dialogue state, and rules under which a dialogue proceeds. One important consideration in implementing a protocol concerns the criteria an agent should apply in choo...

A novel method to account for dynamic speaker characteristic properties in a speech recognition system is presented. The estimated trajectory of a property can be constrained to be constant or to have a limited rate-of-change within a phone or a sub-phone state. The constraints are implemented by extending each state in the trained Hidden Markov Model by a number of property-value-specific sub-...

Speaker adaptation in speech synthesis transforms a source utterance to a target utterance that differs from the source in terms of voice characteristics. In this paper, we employ vocal tract length normalization, which is generally used in speech recognition to remove individual speaker characteristics, to speaker adaptation in speech synthesis. We propose a frequency warping approach based on...

In this research we propose a novel speaker identification algorithm by formulating the pattern recognition task as a problem of linear regression. Essentially the concept of GMMmean supervector is used to transform variable-length utterances to fixed-length feature vectors. Training utterances from each speaker are used to develop class-specific dictionaries. The unknown test utterance is line...

This study compared the prosody of sarcastic and sincere attitudes in Mexican Spanish in terms of three sentence-level factors (i.e. fundamental frequency (F0) mean, F0 range, and speed of speech) and three word-level factors (i.e. stressed syllable duration, F0 movement, and stressed vowel intensity). For F0, the connection between utterance-final activity and attitude was also examined. Acous...

The present study explores non-durational correlates of the word-initial voiceless stop singleton/geminate contrast in Kelantan Malay (KM) by focusing on the relative values of amplitude and F0 across two syllables of disyllabic words. We are particularly interested in identifying any inter-syllabic differences that could potentially enhance the acoustic salience of voiceless stop geminates in ...