Paragraphs for ProSynth2 Proposal from Mark

Achievements for Previous Research Track Record

The first project achieved (i) creation of an new open speech synthesis architecture based on XML and a declarative knowledge framework; (ii) a codification of knowledge for phonetic interpretation in the domains of duration, intonation and spectral colour for a limited number of sentence types and phonetic segments; (iii) demonstration of the effectiveness of the linguistic formalism and knowledge through perceptual tests; (iv) a collaboration between researchers with complementary skills; (v) dissemination through articles and software of the fruits of our research.

(N.B. We must get our web site up to date and looking 'thrusting' before this proposal goes in)

Further info about software

The software architecture is based on two key principles: an open framework where the internal representations and processing are easy to study, and the use of a declarative rule formalism for the codification of knowledge for phonetic interpretation.  The first allows the system to be developed across sites and makes it accessible to other researchers.  The second allows rule sets to be combined without clashes of rule ordering.  The software system is available as a Windows application for other researchers to experiment with.

Curriculum Vitae

Mark Huckvale has extensive experience in speech synthesis, speech recognition, speech signal processing and software development.  He is vice-chairman of COST 258, and is a named principal investigator on three current EPSRC proposals, primary author of the Speech Filing System software, and main 'voice' on a number of speech synthesis corpora.

Language Modelling Grant

"Enhanced Language Modelling", EPSRC GR/L81406, £167k, 19980401-20010331.

Paragraph on Complementarity

We believe the ProSynth approach to speech synthesis is fundamentally complementary to other work in the area in the U.K.  Our work has been on the linguistic and phonetic detail of the realisation of speech-like sounds: whereas others aim to build statistical approximations that cover a whole corpus, we are the only group looking at the precise phonetic consequences of linguistic contexts.  Ours is the only work in the U.K. that uses perceptual testing to prove that the knowledge we've gained on detailed phonetic effects leads to improvements in cognitive processing.  The results of our work are open and available in a portable knowledge representation to the more systems-based projects such as Festival or SOLE.

Further Work

The project will put considerable effort into making the knowledge that flows out of the project available to others.  There will be a dissemination work package which deals with the issues of software portability and interfaces with other systems.  In particular the dissemination work package will address: (i) interface with Festival (and possibly Laureate), (ii) interface with SOLE, (iii) incorporation of HLSyn and the HLSyn-by-rule subsystem, (iv) web-based demonstration software, (v) software portability across main computing platforms.