Dear Mark:
Thanks for getting this going.
On re-reading your abstract with enough time to think about it, I
discover that there are a lot of things that need some reworkings. Some
are quite important, like we didn;t measure long-range coartic, nor much
naturalness, if what you;re intending to talk about is last times' expts,
which Jill thinks you are! I won;t go into other details here, because,
since the message prefacing your submitted abstract makes it simply a
placeholder, I think we can fix it all up quite easily, but presumably it
must be done fast. Jill tells me you're teaching most of today. I teach
now 9.30-10.30, and 11-12. Please call me to discuss, ASAP.
Sarah
On Fri, 4 Feb 2000, Mark Huckvale wrote:
> Justin
>
> IEE Meeting on State-of-the-Art in Speech Synthesis
>
> Please find an abstract below. The paper will actually be jointly
> authored by the ProSynth project team, who all contributed to the
> work. Thus the names of the final authors on the paper may change.
>
> Yours
>
> Mark Huckvale
> =============================================================================
> Title:
>
> Assessment of Naturalness in the ProSynth Speech Synthesis Project
>
> Authors: (for ProSynth speech synthesis project)
>
> Sebastian Heid, Sarah Hawkins
> Linguistics
> University of Cambridge
>
> Jill House, Mark Huckvale
> Phonetics & Linguistics
> University College London
>
> Abstract:
>
> Scientific progress in any area requires quantification of the mismatch
> between the predictions of theory and the measurements of nature. For many
> years the objective criterion of intelligibility could be used to evaluate
> speech synthesis systems, but with the advent of concatenative and corpus
> synthesis techniques, intelligibility under good listening conditions has
> reached ceiling levels. However, the perceived naturalness of such systems
> still falls far short of the human model, and their intelligibility under
> adverse listening conditions deteriorates rapidly by comparison with
> natural speech. Other objective measures are therefore required to evaluate
> scientific hypotheses about the reasons for the discrepancy.
>
> The most common measure of naturalness used by commercial systems is a mean
> opinion score, calculated from a panel of listeners applying a rating scale.
> Such measures are expensive to undertake and unreliable unless the panel
> size is large. Within the ProSynth synthesis project we have been pursuing
> instead carefully designed perceptual experiments which attempt to tap the
> degree of difficulty in cognitive processing experienced by listeners when
> performing tasks informed by synthetic speech. Within such experiments it
> is possible to make statistical comparisons between speech generated
> according to models of differing complexity, and thus to assess the
> perceptual advantage of an 'improved' over a 'default' model. In our
> ProSynth work, we predict such an advantage when systematic phonetic
> variation is correctly modelled.
>
> In this paper we will review three perceptual experiments undertaken in the
> areas of timing, intonation and long-range coarticulation. The experiments
> are based on the hypothesis that 'unnaturalness' disturbs listeners'
> processing of speech signals and slows their reaction times. We shall give
> some examples where this effect does seem to be present in our data. The
> paper concludes with some hard-won recommendations on experimental procedures.
>
>
Sarah
_____________________________________________________________________
Dr. Sarah Hawkins Email: sh110@cam.ac.uk
Dept. of Linguistics Phone: +44 1223 33 50 52
University of Cambridge Fax: +44 1223 33 50 53
Sidgwick Avenue or +44 1223 33 50 62
Cambridge CB3 9DA
United Kingdom
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