[Colloquium] Wang/MS Presentation/Dec. 1, 2005

[Margaret Jaffey]

Siwei Wang's MS Presentation will be held this afternoon.

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Date:  Thursday, December 1, 2005

Time:  3:00 p.m.

Place:  Ryerson 251

M.S. Candidate:  Siwei Wang

M.S. Paper Title:  Improving Tone Recognition with Combined Pitch and  
Intensity Modeling

Abstract:
Tone recognition is an essential component of speech recognition for
tonal languages. Tones produced in continuous speech differ from their
ideal underlying representation due to co-articulation with
neighboring tones,as well as other intonational factors. These
influences distort both tone shape and height and lead to confusion in
automatic tone recognition,though human perception is remarkably
robust to these changes in context.

Based on prior work emphasizing prosodic strength and use of intensity
for tone recognition in devoiced and noisy speech, we develop tone
recognition techniques that augment standard pitch-based approaches
with intensity. Intensity features are employed both for tone region
segmentation to model coarticulatory influences and in the feature
vector for recognition. We apply both Support Vector Machine and Sparse
Markov
  Transducer learning frameworks for tone recognition on a
corpus of Mandarin broadcast news speech. In SVM-based experiments,
we achieve a result consistently 15\% better using our segmentation
than using a simple time-based segmentation.  In addition,SMT-based
results using a variable length segmentation based on intensity and
pitch features outperform those using only pitch features by 6\%
We conclude with plans for future work invovling different languages
and learning models.


Advisor:  Prof. Gina Levow

A draft copy of Siwei Wang'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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