A phonetic dictionary is an essential component of a speech recognition system or a speech synthesis system. Our work targets the generation of an automatic pronunciation dictionary for the Tunisian Arabic, in particular in the field of rail transport. To do this, we created two tools of phonetic vowelized and unvowelized words in the Tunisian Arabic. The proposed method to automatically genera...

Listeners identify talkers more accurately in their na­ tive language than an unknown, foreign language in a phenomenon called the language-familiarity effect. However, the psychological basis for this effect re­ mains unknown. Some have suggested that the linguistic processes involved in speech perception and comprehension facilitate native­language talker identification. Others have argued th...

Unit selection based speech synthesis is able to generate high quality speech. During unit selection process, a set of unit candidates are provided for each target unit. Its performance is degraded with a large number of candidates. In order to improve the speed of the unit selection process, it is important to determine a small set of candidates. This needs a candidate selection method that do...

D-scripts model is originally developed for description of affective (emotional) mass media texts and with extension also applies to emotional speech synthesis. In this model we distinguish units for “rational” inference (r-scripts) and units for “emotional” processing of meaning (d-scripts). Basing on a psycholinguistics study we demonstrate relations between classes of emotional utterances in...

In this paper, we propose a speech-presence uncertainty estimation to improve the global soft decision-based speech enhancement technique by using the spectral gradient scheme. The conventional soft decision-based speech enhancement technique uses a fixed ratio (Q) of the a priori speech-presence and speech-absence probabilities to derive the speech-absence probability (SAP). However, we attemp...

Prosodic annotations are used for locating and characterizing prominent parts in utterances as well as identifying and describing boundaries of coherent stretches of speech. In speech synthesis prosodic annotations can be used to improve the unit selection process and subsequently yield more natural sounding synthesis. A method for automatic prosodic annotations of speech is described in this p...

Synthesis of realistic facial animation for arbitrary speech is an important but difficult problem. The difficulties lie in the synchronization between lip motion and speech, articulation variation under different phonetic context, and expression variation in different speaking style. To solve these problems, we propose a visual speech synthesis system based on a fivestate, multi-stream HMM, wh...

Speech communication is embedded in many daily activities. In this paper we investigate the effect of biking on respiratory and speech parameters. Breathing and speech production were recorded in eleven subjects while speaking alone and while speaking and biking with different rates. Breathing frequency, speaking rate, speech and pause intervals, overall intensity and f0 were analyzed for the d...

This paper reports the results of a pilot phonetic study of whistled Moroccan Tamazight. Whistled speech is an ancient traditional and natural practice that consists in a phonetic emulation and transformation of the spoken signal into a simple melodic line made up of frequency and amplitude modulations of a whistled signal. It is primarily used for long distance communication. We recorded four ...