This paper deals with the problems of automatic segmentation for the purposes of Czech concatenative speech synthesis. Statistical approach to speech segmentation using hidden Markov models (HMMs) is applied in the baseline system. Several improvements of this system are then proposed to get more accurate segmentation results. These enhancements mainly concern the various strategies of HMM init...

We consider the first boundary value problem for a singularly perturbed parabolic PDE with convection on an interval. For the case of sufficiently smooth data, it is easy to construct a standard finite difference operator and a piecewise uniform mesh, condensing in the boundary layer, which gives an ε-uniformly convergent difference scheme. The order of convergence for such a scheme is exactly ...

This study examines prosodic characteristics of speech in dialogue exchanges. Subjects were asked to repeat the same correction of one digit in a three-digit sequence consisting of ‘five’ or ‘nine,’ followed by ‘Pine Street.’ Articulatory and acoustic signals were obtained on four speakers of General American English at the University of Wisconsin x-ray microbeam facility. These data are analyz...

From the South Pole, microthermal turbulence within a narrow surface boundary layer some 200 m thick provides the dominant contribution to the astronomical seeing. We present results for the seeing at a wavelength of 2.4µm. The narrow turbulence layer above the site, confined close to the surface, provides greatly superior conditions for adaptive optics correction than do temperate latitude sit...

This paper proposes a new stationarity test based on the KPSS test with less size distortion. We extend the boundary rule proposed by Sul, Phillips and Choi (2005) to the autoregressive spectral density estimator and parametrically estimate the long-run variance. We also derive the finite sample bias of the numerator of the test statistic up to the 1/T order and propose a correction to the bias...

In the framework of the theory of defects/three-dimensional gravitation, it is obtained a positive correction to the magnetic moment of the electron bound to a disclination in a dielectric solid. ∗On leave from: Departamento de F́ısica Universidade Federal de Pernambuco 50670-901 Recife, PE, Brazil The force between two neutral metallic parallel plates, the Casimir effect [1], is a well-known ma...

The boundary value problem for a singularly perturbed parabolic PDE with convection is considered on an interval in the case of the singularly perturbed Robin boundary condition; the highest space derivatives in the equation and in the boundary condition are multiplied by the perturbation parameter ε. In contrast to a Dirichlet boundary value problem, for the problem under consideration the err...

The boundary-value problem for a singularly perturbed parabolic PDE with convection is considered on an interval in the case of the singularly perturbed Robin boundary condition; the highest space derivatives in the equation and in the boundary condition are multiplied by the perturbation parameter ε. In contrast to the Dirichlet boundary-value problem, for the problem under consideration the e...

We construct boundary states for supertubes in the flat spacetime. Since the T-dual objects of supertubes are moving spiral D1-branes (D-helices), which we can obtain from the usual D1-branes via null deformation, we can construct the boundary states for these moving D-helices in the covariant formalism. Using these boundary states, we calculate the vacuum amplitude between two supertubes in th...

In order to get the extracted lung region from CT images more accurately, a model that contains lung region extraction and edge boundary correction is proposed. Firstly, a new edge detection function is presented with the help of the classic structure tensor theory. Secondly, the initial lung mask is automatically extracted by an improved active contour model which combines the global intensity...