This paper reports on the results of a research carried out during 1993-94 aiming at studying street sellers as an informal sector activity and a source of socio-economic problems in Shiraz, Iran. This study makes use of two Logit models in order to present a unified framework depiciting the factors that seem to affect the developmeht of informal sector activities. The first model looks at thos...

Text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis systems have grown popularity due to their diverse practical usability. While most of the technologies developed aims to meet requirements in laboratory environment, the practical appliance is not limited to a specific environment. This work aims towards improving intelligibility of synthesized speech to make it deployable in realism. Based on the comparison of Lo...

Comparing the questions -proposed for this discourse panel with those identified for the TINLAP-2 panel eight years ago, it becomes clear that some progress has been made in discourse studies. While TINLAP-2's questions seem concerned with identifying an ideal model of discourse (e.g., what constitutes an appropriate model of discourse, how domain-dependent must such models be, what makes disco...

The percentage of vocalic intervals (%V) and the standard deviation of consonantal intervals (deltaC) in a speech signal are two dimensions according to which languages of different rhythm classes (e.g. stress-timed, syllable-timed) seem to be differentiable on an acoustic level (Ramus et al., 1999). In this context it has been found that especially deltaC varies considerably as a function of s...

Experimental evidence about human speech processing and linguistic memory shows that words are not spelled from letter-like units, whether thought of as phones or phonemes. Linguists, like others with a Western education and a lifetime of literacy, identify speech quite automatically with a sequence of letter-sized units. Consonants and vowels seem like directly observable units in speech. Howe...

One of the interesting topics on multimedia domain is concerned with empowering computer in order to speech production. Speech synthesis is granting human abilities to the computer for speech production. Data-based approach and process-based approach are the two main approaches on speech synthesis. Each approach has its varied challenges. Unit-selection speech synthesis and statistical parametr...

Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) voice conversion (VC) models are attractive owing to their ability convert prosody. Nonetheless, without sufficient data, seq2seq VC can suffer from unstable training and mispronunciation problems in the converted speech, thus far practical. To tackle these shortcomings, we propose transfer knowledge other speech processing tasks where large-scale corpora easily a...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive and irreversible disease which gradually makes patients unable to do their daily routines. Although the present treatments can not cure the disease completely, its early detection can reduce symptoms and enhance the patients’ life quality. In the current literature, using the grey matter (GM) tissue which is known as an appropriate biomarker is highly c...