The article presents a joint audio-video approach towards speaker identity conversion, based on statistical methods originally introduced for voice conversion. Using the experimental data from the 3D BIWI Audiovisual corpus of Affective Communication, mapping functions are built between each two speakers in order to convert speaker-specific features: speech signal and 3D facial expressions. The...

Detectors for accents and phrase boundaries have been developed which derive prosodic features from the speech signal and its fundamental frequency to support other modules of a speech understanding system in an early analysis stage, or in cases where no word hypotheses are available. The detectors' underlying Gaussian distribution classi ers were trained with 50 minutes and tested with 30 minu...

This paper attempts to provide a sketch of formalism for Contrastive Topic in Korean and English. Based on the idea that a discourse structure basically consists of question/answer pairs, the proposed formalism shows 1) Korean contrastive topic corresponds to a certain prosody in English and the information structure for contrastive topic in both languages is essentially same, 2) Contrastive to...

This paper validates a parametric approach to intonation acquisition research [1] using child-directed speech data. An advantage of this approach is that it can be used for studying child speech as well as adult speech. Within the field of prosody acquisition it reconciles independent approaches to child prosody with ToBI-based approaches. In this paper we substantiate this claim by showing tha...

RISES ALL THE WAY UP: THE INTERPRETATION OF PROSODY, DISCOURSE ATTITUDES AND DIALOGUE STRUCTURE

Human speech, as a collection of complex phenomena, can be explored from many different angles, and interesting data can be generated with various approaches. However, if we aim to substantially improve our understanding of speech, it is advantageous to focus on the communicative functions and the mechanisms that enable these functions. This paper uses prosodic phenomena in speech as examples t...

Recent research on children’s acquisition of prosody, or the rhythm and melody in language, demonstrates that young children use prosody in their comprehension and production of utterances to a greater extent than was previously documented. Spoken language, structured by prosodic form, is the primary input on which the mental representations and processes that comprise language use are built. U...

This paper summarizes a flora of explorative visualization techniques for prosody developed at KTH. It is demonstrated how analysis can be made which goes beyond conventional methodology. Examples are given for turn taking, affective speech, response tokens and Swedish accent II.