[Colloquium] Jansen/M.S. Presentation/April 21, 2005

[Margaret Jaffey]

This is an announcement of Aren Jansen's Master's Presentation.

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Date:  Thursday, April 21, 2005

Time:  10:30 a.m.

Place:  Ryerson 251

M.S. Candidate:  Aren Jansen

M.S. Paper Title:  The Manifold Nature of Vowel Sounds

Abstract:
Recently there has been great interest in geometrically motivated
approaches to data analysis and pattern recognition.
Low-dimensional structure in higher-dimensional data can be
exploited by manifold-based data reduction and learning algorithms to
improve performance.  The existence of such a structure in speech has
not been formally documented.  Toward this end, I present a derivation
of the approximate discrete spectra of sustained vowel phonemes using
standard tube models of the vocal tract.  Adopting a geometrical
approach, each N-point discrete frequency spectrum produced using
these models represents a point in R^N.  Given a continuous
range of vocal tract model parameters, I either formally or graphically
demonstrate that the subsets of Euclidean space traced out by the
resulting spectra positions form low-dimensional, extrinsically
curved manifolds that span the ambient space.  Tube model parameters
that approximate the vocal tract configurations for various vowel
phonemes determine the approximate manifold structure for several
sustained vowel sounds.  Using the manifolds for the phonemes /a/ and
/ae/ as input, the manifold-based Laplacian eigenmap dimensionality
reduction algorithm of Belkin and Niyogi outperforms
traditional principal component analysis, both with and without the
introduction of noise.

Advisor: Prof. Partha Niyogi

A draft copy of Aren Jansen's MS Paper is available in Ry 161A.

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Margaret P. Jaffey				margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 161A)		(773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago		http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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