This article describes the preparation, recording and orthographic transcription of a new speech corpus, the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual French (NCCFr). The corpus contains a total of over 36 hours of recordings of 46 French speakers engaged in conversations with friends. Casual speech was elicited during three different parts, which together provided around ninety minutes of speech from every pa...

While automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have steadily improved and are now in widespread use, their accuracy continues to lag behind human performance, particularly in adverse conditions. This thesis revisits the basic acoustic modeling assumptions common to most ASR systems and argues that improvements to the underlying model of speech are required to address these shortcomings. A num...

Pitch determination and speech segmentation are two important parts of speech recognition and speech processing in general. This paper proposes a time-based event detection method for finding the pitch period of a speech signal. Based on the discrete wavelet transform, it detects voiced speech, which is local in frequency, and determines the pitch period. This method is computationally inexpens...

We analyze the concept of focus in speech and the relationship between focus and speech acts for prosodic generation. We determine how the speaker’s utterances are influenced by speaker’s intention. The relationship between speech acts and focus information is used to define which parts of the sentence serve as the focus parts. We propose the Focus to Emphasize Tones (FET) structure to analyze ...

Pitch determination and speech segmentation are two important parts of speech recognition and speech processing in general. This paper proposes a time-based event detection method for finding the pitch period of a speech signal. Based on the discrete wavelet transform, it detects voiced speech, which is local in frequency, and determines the pitch period. This method is computationally inexpens...

This paper examines three ways to improve part-of-speech tagging accuracy: by increasing the number of training examples presented to the tree learner, by increasing the number of word-specific subtrees grown, and by increasing the number of ngrams (preceding parts of speech) per training example. Though experimental results indicate that additional training data generally leads to the greatest...

This paper presents a new technique for speech synthesis by unit selection. The technique works by specifying the synthesis target and the speech database as phonological trees, and using a selection algorithm which finds the largest parts of trees in the database which match parts of the target tree. The technique avoids many of the errors made by prosody generation modules by incorporating th...