Unit selection speech synthesis systems generally rely on target and concatenation costs for selecting the best unit sequence. The role of the concatenation cost is to insure that joining two voice segments will not cause any acoustic artefact to appear. For this task, acoustic distances (MFCC, F0) are typically used but in many cases, this is not enough to prevent concatenation artefacts. Amon...

Diphone concatenation [1] has the advantages of simplicity and a relatively small database of speech when compared to other concatenative synthesis methods (e.g., [2]). However, diphone concatenation faces two notable problems. The first is coarticulation which extends beyond the scope of a single diphone and entails some degree of contextual mismatch for virtually any diphone in at least some ...

Verbmobil is a speaker-independent system that offers translation assistance in dialogue situations. In co-operation with other institutes we are developing the speech synthesis module within Verbmobil for German and American English. Current priority is given to an enhancement of naturalness of our PSOLA based concatenative synthesis of German. Due to a tight schedule we investigated alternati...

We study collections of Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) defined by High-level MSCs (HMSCs) under a new type of concatenation operation called anchored concatenation. We show that there is no decision procedure for determining if the MSC language defined by an HMSC is regular and that it is undecidable if an HMSC admits an implied scenario. Further, the languages defined by locally synchronized H...

Positive and bottom-up non-erasing binary range concatenation grammars (Boullier, 1998) with at most binary predicates ((2,2)-BRCGs) is a O(|G|n6) time strict extension of inversion transduction grammars (Wu, 1997) (ITGs). It is shown that (2,2)-BRCGs induce inside-out alignments (Wu, 1997) and cross-serial discontinuous translation units (CDTUs); both phenomena can be shown to occur frequently...

In this paper, we consider an asynchronous random access scheme called irregular repetition ALOHA (IRA) as a generalization of contention resolution (CRA) with varying repetitions. We present asymptotic performance analysis CRA and IRA on the collision channel for regular rates. also propose improvement by merging clean parts packet replicas in partial collisions, extend our to scenario well. S...