HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: karenj@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU (Karen Jenkin)
Subject: prosody
Summary: prosody processing in speech recognition?
Keywords: prosody
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 06:50:51 GMT

I am curious about whether any prosody processing has been researched
in speech recogntion (more specifically phonemes).
The analysis of prosody could also be being used in the "voice-stress"
experiments recently discussed in this group.

Can anyone direct me to some refs. or ftp sites on the subject of prosody?

Thanks in advance,
Karen
(karenj@munagin.ee.mu.oz.au)

Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: marshall@seas.gwu.edu (Christopher Marshall)
Subject: HMM with null transitions
Originator: marshall@seas.gwu.edu
Organization: George Washington University
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 19:23:54 GMT

Hi everyone!  Great newsgroup!

I have been waiting for just such a newsgroup.  I am just starting
my master's thesis in speech recognition and I have been studying
hidden markov models.  I understand most of the technical issues
of HMMs except how to implement null transitions.

I am working with HMMs in which a symbol is output when the model
changes state, as opposed to HMMs where symbols are output when
the model occupies a state.  For transition based HMMs, it is sometimes
useful to consider transitions which do not cause a symbol to be
output.  These are called null transitions.

I have been looking through papers and books on HMMs and can not
find any good discussion on how to incorporate null transitions
into the solution of the evaluation, decoding, and learning 
problems.

I am trying to figure out how to solve the evaluation problem
for an HMM with null transitions.

Specifically:

Let Y1..YT be a random variables representing an output sequence of length
T.

For a given HMM, evaluate P(Y1..YT = y1..yT).

I am dying to understand how this works. Please help!

Chris Marshall
marshall@seas.gwu.edu

Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: moshier@world.std.com (Stephen L Moshier)
Subject: Greg Cockroft Vowel Formant Analysis
Keywords: z transform pole frequencies
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1992 02:04:27 GMT

    There are several reasonable ways to define the frequency associated
with a pole pair.  One is
  f = [ pi/2 - arcsin( re / sqrt(re^2+im^2) ) ] fs/(2 pi), where re, im
are the real and imaginary parts of the pole and fs is the sampling
frequency. 
 
 

Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: broehl@sunee.uwaterloo.ca (Bernie Roehl)
Subject: Re: TMS5220 speech synthesizer
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1992 05:30:47 GMT

In article <BvI2wu.A7t@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> mdchaney@fractal.ucs.indiana.edu (M Darrin Chaney) writes:
>Does anyone have a programming manual for the TMS5220 chip from TI?  This
>was used in their home computer 12 years ago, and produced excellent speech
>(very near human quality) at about 200bytes/second.  All I know now is that
>it used a mathematical model of the human vocal tract.

This is what's known as an LPC algorithm.  It uses a set of parameters
(typically 10 or 12) to model the resonances of the vocal tract.

(An aside: Does anyone have any code for LPC compression/decompression?  I
came across one on wuarchive; it looks quite good, put it only does
compression, not playback).
 
>I've not been able to ever find programming help for it, not even from TI.

I believe it's been replaced by the TMS50c20 and its relatives.  I know the
50c40 (a preprogrammed LPC player) will support 5220 format speech roms.

-- 
	Bernie Roehl, University of Waterloo Electrical Engineering Dept
	Mail: broehl@sunee.UWaterloo.ca
	BangPath: uunet!watmath!sunee!broehl
	Voice:  (519) 885-1211 x 2607 [work]
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From:  shura@speech.lang.lgu.spb.su (Alexander L. Gorlovsky)
Subject: ? Sierra Semiconductor chip set
Reply-To: shura@speech.lang.lgu.spb.su
Organization: University of St-Petersburg, Speech Recognition Lab.
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 13:57:21 GMT
Keywords: speech recognition

Hi...

We are very interested in detailed info on Sierra Semiconductor
chip set.  Where can we get it? 

Thanks in advance.



Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: mikef@pacifier.rain.com (Mike Freeman)
Subject: Re: WANTED: ms-dos text-to-speech
Organization: Pacifier BBS
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1992 17:17:02 GMT

In article <1992Oct4.085656.1@venus.ycc.yale.edu> weed@venus.ycc.yale.edu writes:

>Please, Please, remember that there are other possible answers.  Various
>Macintosh-based applications are coming to market, which, I think will handle
>as well, or better, than anything out (in terms of PC software), in the
>availability of control over one's computer.  I am currently writing this post
>on a mac, using Berkeley Systems' "outSPOKEN" a product which I am *very* happy
>with.  If ther   are  blind users out there, who haven't looked at Macintoshes
>because of the perceived vision-biased user interface, it may not be as much of
>a problem as you might think.  

Kelly Ford (another blind user who works for the Trace Center) would
agree with you.  Nevertheless, two things should be pointed out:  (1)
there are many blind users who find Outspoken on the Mac rather confusing
to use; they tell me they tend to go "round and round" in trying to
navigate its menus.  (2) Although I have received this info second-hand
and it may be thus ruled inadmissible, I understand that Outspoken has
trouble with unfamiliar (read out-of-the-ordinary) applications; it
doesn't always speak everything that it should.

I don't want to start a flame-war over specific speech software/hardware
for the blind (we can do that on BlinkTalk).  In the interests of
providing complete info to those unfamiliar with this rather 
specialized subject, though, I thought these things should be mentioned.

For those who are knew to this world, I again reiterate that there is
more to good speech software for the blind than just reciting what goes
by on the screen (Matt, you and I can agree on that, at least <grin>).
See my earlier post and that of Dan Frankowski.

BTW, this is a great new newsgroup!

Thanks for reading.

-- 
Mike Freeman <K7UIJ>    |       Internet: mikef@pacifier.rain.com
301 N.E. 107th Street   |         or freeman@watsun.cc.columbia.edu
Vancouver, WA 98685 USA |       GEnie: M.FREEMAN11
Telephone (206)574-8221 |       Loose bits sink chips!
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: 880506s@dragon.acadiau.ca (James R. Skinner)
Subject: Text to speech on sun
Organization: Acadia University
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 19:49:12 GMT


	Does anybody know were to find a text to speech converter for SUN
workstations.  I am looking for someting along the lines of sbtalk for the
soundblaster on the PC platform.  Thanks


-- 

-----------------------------------+--------------------------------------------
        James Robie Skinner        |     Jodrey School of Computer Science        James.Skinner@dragon.acadiau.ca  |  Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, Canada
-----------------------------------+--------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: andrewh@ee.su.OZ.AU (Andrew Hunt)
Subject: Welcome to comp.speech
Followup-To: comp.speech
Reply-To: andrewh@ee.su.OZ.AU (Andrew Hunt)
Organization: University of Sydney, Australia
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 23:27:30 GMT

Welcome to comp.speech.  Thank you to all who voted for the formation of
the group.  Thanks to Tony Robinson (Cambridge Uni), Andrew Tridgell
(Australian National Uni), Goh Kawai (SRI International, Calif), and
David Leip (Uni of Guelp, Canada) for their work in setting up the group.

I've included a copy of the Group's charter below.

I am working on a FAQ andbut will need volunteers to help in several areas.
And, Tony Robinson has set up an archive site.  More about these matters later.

Looking forward to a productive newsgroup.

Cheers,
Andrew Hunt

Speech Technology Group              email: andrewh@ee.su.oz.au
Dept Electrical Engineering          Ph:  61-2-692 4509
University of Sydney, Australia.     Fax: 61-2-692 3847


###

Comp.Speech Charter
-------------------

comp.speech is an unmoderated newsgroup for discussion of application and
research issues associated with speech technology and speech science.
By nature speech technology is an inter-disciplinary field and the 
newsgroup should reflect this.  Computer application should be the basic
theme of the group.

The following is a list of possible topics but does not cover 
all matters related to the field - no order of importance is implied.

[1] Speech Recognition - discussion of methodologies, training, 
techniques, results and applications.  This should cover the application
of techniques including HMMs, neural-nets and so on to the field.

[2] Speech Synthesis - discussion concerning theoretical and practical
issues associated with the design on speech synthesis systems.

[3] Speech Coding and Compression - both research and application matters.

[4] Phonetic/Linguistic Issues - coverage of linguistic and phonetic issues 
which are relevant to speech technology applications.  Could cover parsing, 
natural language processing, and prosodic work.

[5] Speech System Design - issues relating to the application of
speech technology to real-world problems.  Includes the design of
user interfaces, the building of real-time systems and so on.

[6] Other matters - relevant conferences, books, public domain software, 
hardware, and related products and so on.
From: gwertzma@husc10.harvard.edu (James Gwertzman)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: New Chips
Keywords: voice recognition
Date: 4 Oct 92 02:11:44 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc10.gwertzma.718164704

I have here in front of me the front page from the Electronic
Buyer's News.  Aparently there is a new chip set, just released from Sierra
Semiconductor, which should make affordable voice recognition available
to PC's on a wide basis.

They are based on a "flexible digital signal processor architecture" and
include drivers for Windows 3.1. They are priced at $65 and $84
respectively, and allow the pc to recognize individually spoken words.

Each chip set comes with a controller, a DSP, and a memory device. 
-- 
James Gwertzman	                 :                  It's all in my .plan
From: mike@mote.Berkeley.EDU (Mike Friedrich)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Macintalk calls from Think Pascal?
Keywords: dsp,sound effects,ad,da,guitar,pc
Date: 6 Oct 92 06:18:23 GMT
Organization: University of California at Berkeley

I would like to talk from my Think Pascal program.  Does anyone have some
code for making calls to the Toolbox routines for Macintalk, or something
similar?  I have some old Turbo Pascal code that works, but I can't get it
to work in Think Pascal.  Thanks!
-- Mike
mike@mote.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: tridge@nimbus.anu.edu.au (Andrew Tridgell)
Subject: Re: Help on design of speech recognition
Keywords: speech recognition
Organization: Comp. Sci. Lab., Australian National Uni.
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 92 23:36:48 GMT

In article <lels.9.718355427@unpcs1.cs.unp.ac.za>, lels@unpcs1.cs.unp.ac.za (Leonard Els) writes:
|> I am working on a Speaker Independant Speech Recognition system and was
|> wondering what the best measurements are, to use in the analysis.
|> 
|> I have come accross the following: Zero-Crossing rate, Energy, LPC,
|> Cepstral Coefficients, and formant analysis

For speaker independant recognition the most popular are probably 
the cepstrals. 

There are problems with using formants - not the least of which is 
find how to calculate them! If you know of some way to robustly 
calculate their values in a speaker independant way then please share 
it with us.

My own personal favourite is the engineering approach. This is to throw
all the ingredients which might be useful into a cooking pot and stir
vigorously.

The way I do this is to use LDA (linear discriminant analysis) on a
feature vector comprising a few of the common parameters (maybe cepstrals, delta-cepstrals, band-power, delta-band-power, zcr and energy). This
gives me a new feature vector of reduced dimension, but where each
parameter has a high discrimination for the task at hand.


Andrew

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Andrew Tridgell                 CSLab, Research School of Physical Sciences
Andrew.Tridgell@anu.edu.au      Australian National University (x3064)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: p9214305@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au (Robert Pascale)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Re: Wanted:Head & shoulder image & speech data
Date: 6 Oct 92 10:26:04 GMT
Organization: RMIT Computer Centre
NNTP-Posting-Host: minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au

luosu@waves.su.OZ.AU (Luo Su Huai) writes:

>Hello,all,
>I am doing some work on synthesizing human face image through speech for my 
>Ph.D thesis. Now I urgently need the sample data,both in image and in speech.
>The data should be several minutes of head and shoulder image and corresponding
>speech. I need a male speaking some sentences( with the words known). And
>both the digital image and speech data can be acccessed frame by frame(prefer 
>20ms/f).  Could anyone please offer me any information about how to get this?
>Thanks very much in advance.

>Luo Suhuai
>School of Electrical Engineering
>University of Sydney
>NSW 2006,Sydney,Australia
>luosu@ee.su.oz.au

There is a Macintosh program that does exactly this. Unfortunately, I can't 
remember the name of it at the moment. It was designed to shop cut-away images
of the human face to help people with speech disablilities. I will look for
the details and post when I find it.

Regards,

Robert Pascale
Dept Maths & Computing
RMIT - Bundoora Campus
p9214305@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: danforth@riacs.edu (Douglas G. Danforth)
Subject: Re: ANN's for Recognition Systems
Organization: RIACS, NASA Ames Research Center
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 92 23:45:50 GMT

In <1992Oct4.012854.13893@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> metzlers@spot.Colorado.EDU 
(METZLER SANDRA TAIMI) writes:

>Being fairly new to the world of speech recognition and the world of
>artificial neural nets, I keep coming across the following question (in
>my own mind):

>I notice that all the speech recog. systems I have seen which are based
>on ANN's use a backpropogation net.  My question is: why this type of
>net?  Why not use a Hopfield net--somehow, the idea of the resonances
>of a Hopfield net (or one of that type) really appeals to me.  I 

Associative memories can also be used and have the advantage over
a Hopfield net that the number of patterns recognized need not be limited
by the dimensionality of the input space.  In an autoassociative memory
the input pattern is also the output pattern.  In a heteroassociative
memory the output pattern need not be related to the input in any way
other than it is associated with the input.

Associative memories have been successfully used for speech recognition.
At NASA Ames a modified form of the Kanerva Sparce Distributed Memory
achieved 100% on single speaker digit recognition (320 utterances for
training and 320 different utterances for testing).  On a single
talker E-set task the results were 94% (225 utterances for training
and 675 different utternances for testing).  The Eset is the 9 letters
(in the US "z" is pronounced "zee") b,c,d,e,g,p,t,v,z.

There are other nonbackprop approaches that have been used.  Perhaps
others would like to comment on them here?

Douglas Danforth
From: mike@mote.Berkeley.EDU (Mike Friedrich)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Re: Mac/Amiga speech, non-english languages
Keywords: dsp,sound effects,ad,da,guitar,pc
Date: 6 Oct 92 06:09:35 GMT
Organization: University of California at Berkeley

One weekend I was bored and wrote a Hypercard stack that converts a foreign
text to phonetic phrases so that MacTalker can pronounce them correctly,
albeit with an American accent.  Currently it does German and Spanish, but
you can teach it other languages if you give it a set of rules.
If you'd like it, E-mail me.
-- Mike
mike@mote.berkelely.edu
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: horacio@iastate.edu (Horacio Martinez-Alfaro)
Subject: Looking for VOC and WAB formats
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 15:13:18 GMT


Does anyone have some information on how files are written (structure)
with these formats ? I need to have access to voice data written with
those formats. Thanks in advanced for your help.

-- Horacio.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 Horacio Martinez-Alfaro      |               horacio@iastate.edu
 Mechanical Eng. Dept.        | "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and
 Iowa State University        |  look around once in a while, you'll miss it"
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: nat@netcom.com (Nathaniel Stitt)
Subject: Re: Voice Stress Analysis
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest)
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 15:48:30 GMT

In article <1992Oct6.001453.14982@eng.ufl.edu> george@beta.ee.ufl.edu (George L) writes:
>In article <9227613.17164@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> mkwan@cs.mu.OZ.AU (Matthew Kwan) writes:
>>I suppose this is the right newsgroup ...
>>
>>Here and there I've come across vague references to a technique
>>known as voice stress analysis, which allegedly works as a form
...
>
>Actually, this is an extremely timely subject. With the upcoming elections, 
>we will have a wealth of valid data (complete with video as well). If some-
>one finds a decent approach, we can all calibrate our equipment direct 
>from the lips of our politicians.
>

But do you use this data to calibrate your insterment for the detection
of TRUTH, or of DECEPTION?

N

Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: mcolthea@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au (Max Coltheart)
Subject: Re: Have speech, want text
Organization: Macquarie University, Australia.
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 06:41:38 GMT

In article <1992Oct2.143748.3931@news.uit.no> torbjorn.sund@tft.tele.no (Torbjorn Sund) writes:
>I have digitized speech on disk.
>Does anybody know a program to take
>the sound data and convert to text?
>(The vocabulary is small, and the
>conversion can be done off-line)
>
>pd or commercial, compiled code
>or source, PC or UNIX is fine.
>(Of course, a good pd program with
>source will be preferred).
>
>Hmm, maybe I should ask the Intelligene Agency ...
>

Or hire a non-deaf human being? That's the cheapest and also most accurate technique ...

Why must it be a program?


MaxC

Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: torbjorn.sund@tft.tele.no (Torbjorn Sund)
Subject: Have speech, want text
Organization: Norwegian Telecom Research, Norway
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 14:37:48 GMT

I have digitized speech on disk.
Does anybody know a program to take
the sound data and convert to text?
(The vocabulary is small, and the
conversion can be done off-line)

pd or commercial, compiled code
or source, PC or UNIX is fine.
(Of course, a good pd program with
source will be preferred).

Hmm, maybe I should ask the Intelligene Agency ...

-----
Torbjorn Sund	                    Norwegian Telecom Research
Telephone +47 83 10267              P.O. Box 1156
Telefax   +47 83 10262              N-9001 TROMSO
<torbjorn.sund@tft.tele.no>         NORWAY
From: ajb8886@ritvax.isc.rit.edu
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Speech recognition info wanted
Date: 5 Oct 92 17:47:14 GMT
Reply-To: ajb8886@ritvax.isc.rit.edu
Organization: Rochester Institute of Technology


I'm no expert on the subject of speech recognition, but I have an intense
personal interest in this field, as I lost a good part of my hearing in an 
accident, and thus would like to find a viable (read: computer assisted) way 
to understand the spoken word.

I would appreciate it if anyone would be willing to share any new information
concerning developments in progress, either by mail or by posting here,
whichever you prefer.

Naturally of course, my primary interest is in the "holy grail", ie. 
speaker-independent recognition.  However, I'm also curious as to whether
there are any prototype programs that can merely display the the approximate
sound for a given syllable (ie "da ap rocks im eight sow and"); such a 
program would be very helpful as well.

Thanks in advance.

Alex

[insert generic disclaimer here]
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: mkwan@cs.mu.OZ.AU (Matthew Kwan)
Subject: Voice Stress Analysis
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 03:14:47 GMT

I suppose this is the right newsgroup ...

Here and there I've come across vague references to a technique
known as voice stress analysis, which allegedly works as a form
of lie detector. Now that I've got my hands on some audio sampling
equipment, I'd really like to give it a try.

Can anyone explain how it works, or at least point me in the
direction of some references? Any information would be appreciated,
since all I've got at the moment are scenes from Robocop and an
old Miami Vice episode ;-)

mkwan
From: jrs@nic.cerf.net (James R. Stutt)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Re: Voice Stress Analysis
Date: 3 Oct 92 02:37:23 GMT
Organization: CERFnet

In article <9227613.17164@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> mkwan@cs.mu.OZ.AU (Matthew Kwan) writes:
>
>Here and there I've come across vague references to a technique
>known as voice stress analysis, which allegedly works as a form
>of lie detector. ing
>

This is what is referred to as a PSE (Psychiatric Stress Evaluator).  You should be able to get info from your local law enforcement people.

Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: mfw@mullauna.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Michael John FEARN-WANNAN)
Subject: Re: Help on design of speech recognition
Keywords: speech recognition
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 23:55:33 GMT

lels@unpcs1.cs.unp.ac.za (Leonard Els) writes:

>Hi,

>I am working on a Speaker Independant Speech Recognition system and was
>wondering what the best measurements are, to use in the analysis.

>I have come accross the following: Zero-Crossing rate, Energy, LPC,
>Cepstral Coefficients, and formant analysis

>Can I use formant analysis for speaker independant recognition? - or
>should I rather use something else - If formant analysis is not a good
>idea - why not?

If you were to take human speech recognition as a model you would
probably find that all of these analyses and more were being used. There
are all sorts of mechanisms at work in real live speech recognition. It
is unlikely that you can find any one mathematical/engineering type
analysis of a wave form which will give you all the information you need.

Aside from anything else you should remember that the whole hearing/listening/
understanding mechanism is dynamic. It appears that we can focus our ears in
much the same way that we can focus our eyes. There are preattentive
mechanisms which cause us to foveate (to borrow a term from vision) onto
potential events in a waveform (perhaps to help identify features in an
acoustic scene). The point about this is that in most human perception
issues we use multiple cues wherever they are available and we apply our
intelligence/world knowledge/experience to interpretting our sense data. We
often hear what we expect to hear and we listen or look for what we expect
to hear.

Perhaps you should consider using multiple analyses of a waveform and applying
them to some kind of probabilistic model. Maybe get them to cast some vote
about what the segment might represent. A neural network might be useful
or maybe some fuzzy logic, I'm only guessing here. Some of the features you
could extract from the waveform are prosody (i.e. pitch, intensity, duration) 
and formants but you should also look at the lexical, semantic, pragmatic,
phonological, morphological, syntactic aspects of the language in question
for assistance in such things as determining the locations of word boundaries,
disambiguating word/phrase/sentence meanings etc. 

Regards,
Michael

Newsgroups: comp.speech