Hiroshi Shimodaira, Ken-ichi Noma, Mitsuru Nakai, and Shigeki Sagayama. Dynamic Time-Alignment Kernel in Support Vector Machine. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14, NIPS2001, 2:921-928, December 2001. [ bib | .pdf ]

A new class of Support Vector Machine (SVM) that is applicable to sequential-pattern recognition such as speech recognition is developed by incorporating an idea of non-linear time alignment into the kernel function. Since the time-alignment operation of sequential pattern is embedded in the new kernel function, standard SVM training and classification algorithms can be employed without further modifications. The proposed SVM (DTAK-SVM) is evaluated in speaker-dependent speech recognition experiments of hand-segmented phoneme recognition. Preliminary experimental results show comparable recognition performance with hidden Markov models (HMMs).

J. Frankel and S. King. ASR - articulatory speech recognition. In Proc. Eurospeech, pages 599-602, Aalborg, Denmark, September 2001. [ bib | .ps | .pdf ]

In this paper we report recent work on a speech recognition system using a combination of acoustic and articulatory features as input. Linear dynamic models are used to capture the trajectories which characterize each segment type. We describe classification and recognition tasks for systems based on acoustic data in conjunction with both real and automatically recovered articulatory parameters.

Sue Fitt. Morphological approaches for an English pronunciation lexicon. In Proc. Eurospeech 2001, Aalborg, September 2001. [ bib | .ps | .pdf ]

Most pronunciation lexica for speech synthesis in English take no account of morphology. Here we demonstrate the benefits of including a morphological breakdown in the transcription. These include maintaining consistency, developing the symbol set and providing the environmental description for allophones and phonetic variables. Our approach does not use a full morphological generator, but includes morphlogical boundaries in the lexicon.

Mitsuru Nakai, Naoto Akira, Hiroshi Shimodaira, and Shigeki Sagayama. Substroke Approach to HMM-based On-line Kanji Handwriting Recognition. In Proc. ICDAR'01, pages 491-495, September 2001. [ bib | .pdf ]

A new method is proposed for on-line handwriting recognition of Kanji characters. The method employs substroke HMMs as minimum units to constitute Japanese Kanji characters and utilizes the direction of pen motion. The main motivation is to fully utilize the continuous speech recognition algorithm by relating sentence speech to Kanji character, phonemes to substrokes, and grammar to Kanji structure. The proposed system consists input feature analysis, substroke HMMs, a character structure dictionary and a decoder. The present approach has the following advantages over the conventional methods that employ whole character HMMs. 1) Much smaller memory requirement for dictionary and models. 2) Fast recognition by employing efficient substroke network search. 3) Capability of recognizing characters not included in the training data if defined as a sequence of substrokes in the dictionary. 4) Capability of recognizing characters written by various different stroke orders with multiple definitions per one character in the dictionary. 5) Easiness in HMM adaptation to the user with a few sample character data.

Sue Fitt. Using real words for recording diphones. In Proc. Eurospeech 2001, September 2001. [ bib | .ps | .pdf ]

This paper focuses on the creation of word-lists for making diphone recordings for speech synthesis. Such lists often consist of nonsense words, which has the advantage that the phonetic environment can be constrained, and it is easy to produce lists containing all possible combinations. However, this approach has the disadvantage that non-experts may find it difficult to read the nonsense-word transcriptions. For this reason, we investigate here the issues associated with the use of real words in creating diphone recordings.

Shigeki Sagayama, Yutaka Kato, Mitsuru Nakai, and Hiroshi Shimodaira. Jacobian Approach to Joint Adaptation to Noise, Channel and Vocal Tract Length. In Proc. ISCA Workshop on Adaptation Methods (Sophia Antipolis, France), pages 117-120, August 2001. [ bib ]

Shigeki Sagayama, Koichi Shinoda, Mitsuru Nakai, and Hiroshi Shimodaira. Analytic Methods for Acoustic Model Adaptation: A Review. In Proc. ISCA Workshop on Adaptation Methods (Sophia Antipolis France), pages 67-76, August 2001. Invited Paper. [ bib ]

Kanad Keeni, Kunio Goto, and Hiroshi Shimodaira. On Extraction of E-Mail Address from Fax Message for Automatic Delivery to Individual Recipient. In IASTED International Conference on Siganl Processing Pattern Recognition and Application, July 2001. [ bib ]

Katsuhisa Fujinaga, Mitsuru Nakai, Hiroshi Shimodaira, and Shigeki Sagayama. Multiple-Regression Hidden Markov Model. In Proc. ICASSP 2001, May 2001. [ bib | .pdf ]

J. Frankel and S. King. Speech recognition in the articulatory domain: investigating an alternative to acoustic HMMs. In Proc. Workshop on Innovations in Speech Processing, April 2001. [ bib | .ps | .pdf ]

We describe a speech recognition system which uses a combination of acoustic and articulatory features as input. Linear dynamic models capture the trajectories which characterize each segment type. We describe classification and recognition tasks for systems based on acoustic data in conjunction with both real and automatically recovered articulatory parameters.

K. Richmond. Mixture density networks, human articulatory data and acoustic-to-articulatory inversion of continuous speech. In Proc. Workshop on Innovation in Speech Processing, pages 259-276. Institute of Acoustics, April 2001. [ bib | .ps ]

K. Koumpis, S. Renals, and M. Niranjan. Extractive summarization of voicemail using lexical and prosodic feature subset selection. In Proc. Eurospeech, pages 2377-2380, Aalborg, Denmark, 2001. [ bib | .ps.gz | .pdf ]

This paper presents a novel data-driven approach to summarizing spoken audio transcripts utilizing lexical and prosodic features. The former are obtained from a speech recognizer and the latter are extracted automatically from speech waveforms. We employ a feature subset selection algorithm, based on ROC curves, which examines different combinations of features at different target operating conditions. The approach is evaluated on the IBM Voicemail corpus, demonstrating that it is possible and desirable to avoid complete commitment to a single best classifier or feature set.

O. Goubanova. Predicting segmental durations using Bayesian Belief networks. In CD-ROM Proc. 4th ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Speech Synthesis, Scotland, UK, 2001. [ bib ]

K. Koumpis, C. Ladas, and S. Renals. An advanced integrated architecture for wireless voicemail retrieval. In Proc. 15th IEEE International Conference on Information Networking, pages 403-410, 2001. [ bib | .ps.gz ]

This paper describes an alternative architecture for voicemail data retrieval on the move. It is comprised of three distinct components: a speech recognizer, a text summarizer and a WAP push service initiator, enabling mobile users to receive a text summary of their voicemail in realtime without an explicit request. Our approach overcomes the cost and usability limitations of the conventional voicemail retrieval paradigm which requires a connection establishment in order to listen to spoken messages. We report performance results on all different components of the system which has been trained on a database containing 1843 North American English messages as well as on the duration of the corresponding data path. The proposed architecture can be further customized to meet the requirements of a complete voicemail value-added service.

S. Renals and D. Abberley. The THISL SDR system at TREC-9. In Proc. Ninth Text Retrieval Conference (TREC-9), 2001. [ bib | .ps.gz | .pdf ]

This paper describes our participation in the TREC-9 Spoken Document Retrieval (SDR) track. The THISL SDR system consists of a realtime version of a hybrid connectionist/HMM large vocabulary speech recognition system and a probabilistic text retrieval system. This paper describes the configuration of the speech recognition and text retrieval systems, including segmentation and query expansion. We report our results for development tests using the TREC-8 queries, and for the TREC-9 evaluation.

H. Christensen, Y. Gotoh, and S. Renals. Punctuation annotation using statistical prosody models. In Proc. ISCA Workshop on Prosody in Speech Recognition and Understanding, Red Bank, NJ, USA, 2001. [ bib | .ps.gz | .pdf ]

This paper is about the development of statistical models of prosodic features to generate linguistic meta-data for spoken language. In particular, we are concerned with automatically punctuating the output of a broadcast news speech recogniser. We present a statistical finite state model that combines prosodic, linguistic and punctuation class features. Experimental results are presented using the Hub-4 Broadcast News corpus, and in the light of our results we discuss the issue of a suitable method of evaluating the present task.

C. Mayo, A. Turk, and J. Watson. Flexibility of acoustic cue weighting in children's speech perception. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 109:2313, 2001. [ bib | .pdf ]

M. Wester, J. M. Kessens, C. Cucchiarini, and H. Strik. Obtaining phonetic transcriptions: a comparison between expert listeners and a continuous speech recognizer. Language and Speech, 44(3):377-403, 2001. [ bib | .pdf ]

In this article, we address the issue of using a continuous speech recognition tool to obtain phonetic or phonological representations of speech. Two experiments were carried out in which the performance of a continuous speech recognizer (CSR) was compared to the performance of expert listeners in a task of judging whether a number of prespecified phones had been realized in an utterance. In the first experiment, nine expert listeners and the CSR carried out exactly the same task: deciding whether a segment was present or not in 467 cases. In the second experiment, we expanded on the first experiment by focusing on two phonological processes: schwa-deletion and schwa-insertion. The results of these experiments show that significant differences in performance were found between the CSR and the listeners, but also between individual listeners. Although some of these differences appeared to be statistically significant, their magnitude is such that they may very well be acceptable depending on what the transcriptions are needed for. In other words, although the CSR is not infallible, it makes it possible to explore large datasets, which might outweigh the errors introduced by the mistakes the CSR makes. For these reasons, we can conclude that the CSR can be used instead of a listener to carry out this type of task: deciding whether a phone is present or not.

S. Chang, S. Greenberg, and M. Wester. An elitist approach to articulatory-acoustic feature classification. In Proc. Eurospeech '01, pages 1729-1733, Aalborg, 2001. [ bib | .pdf ]

A novel framework for automatic articulatory-acoustic feature extraction has been developed for enhancing the accuracy of place- and manner-of-articulation classification in spoken language. The elitist approach focuses on frames for which neural network (MLP) classifiers are highly confident, and discards the rest. Using this method, it is possible to achieve a frame-level accuracy of 93% for manner information on a corpus of American English sentences passed through a telephone network (NTIMIT). Place information is extracted for each manner class independently, resulting in an appreciable gain in place-feature classification relative to performance for a manner- independent system. The elitist framework provides a potential means of automatically annotating a corpus at the phonetic level without recourse to a word-level transcript and could thus be of utility for developing training materials for automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis applications, as well as aid the empirical study of spoken language.

K. Koumpis and S. Renals. The role of prosody in a voicemail summarization system. In Proc. ISCA Workshop on Prosody in Speech Recognition and Understanding, Red Bank, NJ, USA, 2001. [ bib | .ps.gz | .pdf ]

When a speaker leaves a voicemail message there are prosodic cues that emphasize the important points in the message, in addition to lexical content. In this paper we compare and visualize the relative contribution of these two types of features within a voicemail summarization system. We describe the system's ability to generate summaries of two test sets, having trained and validated using 700 messages from the IBM Voicemail corpus. Results measuring the quality of summary artifacts show that combined lexical and prosodic features are at least as robust as combined lexical features alone across all operating conditions.

M. Wester, S. Greenberg, and S. Chang. A Dutch treatment of an elitist approach to articulatory-acoustic feature classification. In Proc. Eurospeech '01, pages 1729-1732, Aalborg, 2001. [ bib | .pdf ]

A novel approach to articulatory-acoustic feature extraction has been developed for enhancing the accuracy of classification associated with place and manner of articulation information. This elitist approach is tested on a corpus of spontaneous Dutch using two different systems, one trained on a subset of the same corpus, the other trained on a corpus from a different language (American English). The feature dimensions, voicing and manner of articulation transfer relatively well between the two languages. However, place information transfers less well. Manner-specific training can be used to improve classification of articulatory place information.