Browsing by Author "Lai, WH"

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A new duration modeling approach for Mandarin speech
(2003-07-01)
Chen, SH
;
Lai, WH
;
Wang, YR
;
電信工程研究所
;
Institute of Communications Engineering
In this paper, a new duration modeling approach for Mandarin speech is proposed. It explicitly takes several major affecting factors as multiplicative companding factors (CFs) and estimates all model parameters by an EM algorithm. Besides, the three basic Tone 3 patterns (i.e., full tone, half tone and sandhi tone) are also properly considered via using three different Us to separate their affections on syllable duration. Experimental results showed that the variance of the syllable duration was greatly reduced from 180.17 to 2.52 frame(2) (1 frame =5 ms) by the syllable duration modeling to eliminate effects from those affecting factors. Moreover, the estimated Us of those affecting factors agreed well to our prior linguistic knowledge. Two extensions of the duration modeling method are also performed. One is the use of the same technique to model initial and final durations. The other is to replace the multiplicative model with an additive one. Lastly, a preliminary study of applying the proposed model to predict syllable duration for TTS is also performed. Experimental results showed that it outperformed the conventional regressive prediction method.
A novel syllable duration modeling approach for Mandarin speech
(2001)
Lai, WH
;
Chen, SH
;
電信工程研究所
;
Institute of Communications Engineering
In this paper, a novel syllable duration modeling approach for Mandarin speech is proposed. It explicitly takes several main affecting factors as multiplicative companding parameters and estimates all model parameters by an EM algorithm. Experimental results showed that the variance of the observed syllable duration was greatly reduced from 183.4 frame(2) (1 frame = 5 ms) to 18.5 frame(2) by eliminating effects from these affecting factors. Besides, the estimated companding values of these affecting factors agreed well to our prior linguistic knowledge. A preliminary study of applying the proposed model to predict syllable duration for TTS is also performed. Experimental results showed that it outperformed the conventional regressive prediction method. Lastly, an extension of the approach to incorporate initial and final duration modeling is presented. This leads to a better understanding of the relation between the companding factors of initial and final duration models and those of syllable duration model.
A statistics-based pitch contour model for Mandarin speech
(2005-02-01)
Chen, SH
;
Lai, WH
;
Wang, YR
;
電信工程研究所
;
Institute of Communications Engineering
A statistics-based syllable pitch contour model for Mandarin speech is proposed. This approach takes the mean and the shape of a syllable log-pitch contour as two basic modeling units and considers several affecting factors that contribute to their variations. The affecting factors include the speaker, prosodic state (which essentially represents the high-level linguistic components of F0 and will be explained more clearly in Sec. 1), tone, and initial and final syllable classes. The parameters of the two modeling units were automatically estimated using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Experimental results showed that the root mean squared errors (RMSEs) obtained in the closed and open tests in the reconstructed pitch period were 0.362 and 0.373 ins, respectively. This model provides a way to separate the effects of several major factors. All of the inferred values of the affecting factors were in close agreement with our prior linguistic knowledge. It also gives a quantitative and more complete description of the coarticulation effect of neighboring tones rather than conventional qualitative descriptions of the tone sandhi rules. In addition, the model can provide useful cues to determine the prosodic phrase boundaries, including those occurring at intersyllable locations, with or without punctuation marks. (C) 2005 Acoustical Society of America.
Analysis of syllable duration models for mandarin speech
(2002)
Lai, WH
;
Chen, SH
;
電信工程研究所
;
Institute of Communications Engineering
In this paper, the multiplicative syllable duration model proposed previously for Mandarin speech is extended in some aspects. First, the three basic Tone 3 patterns (i.e., full tone, half tone and sandhi tone) are properly considered via using three different companding factors (CFs) to separate their affections. Second, the CFs of the model are analyzed in detail. Third, the syllable duration modeling method is applied to an automatically-segmented, 500-speaker, telephone-speech database. Fourth, a comparative study to parallelly construct an additive syllable duration model is done.