Browsing by Author "Braga, Daniela"
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- Back close non-syllabic vowel [U] behaviour in European Portuguese: reduction or suppression?Publication . Barros, Maria João; Braga, Daniela; Freitas, Diamantino Silva; Teixeira, João Paulo; Latsch, VagnerIn this paper we analyse and describe the phonetic behavior of the non-tonic back closed vowel [u] in European Portuguese (EP) in what respects its quality and relative duration. Slow and faster speech was used. The objective of this work is to contribute with experimental results in order to obtain a more accurate comprehension of this vowel’s profile, which can be integrated and extended to other non-tonic vowels’ behaviors in the EP non-tonic vowel system. This may represent an important improvement in synthetic speech quality and naturalness, as it concerns acoustical parameters, rhythm and supra-segmental features, which means prosody. This study is inscribed in a project in Speech Synthesis for EP held by an inter-disciplinary group in intimate articulation between the engineering experience and tools and the linguistic approach.
- Correlation between phonetic factors and linguistic events regarding a prosodic pattern of European Portuguese: a practical proposalPublication . Freitas, Diamantino Silva; Braga, Daniela; Barros, Maria João; Latsch, Vagner; Teixeira, João PauloIn this article a prosodic model for European Portuguese (henceforth EP) based on a linguistic approach is described. It was developed in the scope of the Antigona Project, an electronic-commerce system using a speech interface (Speech to Text plus Text To Speech, the latter based on a time concatenation technique) for EP language. The purpose of our work is to contribute with practical strategies in order to improve synthetic speech quality and naturalness, concerning prosodic processing. It is also our goal to show that syntactic structures strongly determine prosody patterns in EP. It is also important to emphasize the pragmatic commercial objective of this system, which is selling a product. Therefore, this type of application deals with a specific vocabulary choice, it is displayed in predictable syntactic constructions and sentences, making prosodic contours and focus become expected. This study was held in intimate articulation between the engineering experience and tools and the linguistic approach. We believe that this work represents an important achievement for future research on synthetic speech processing in particular for EP. Moreover, it can be applied to other Romanic languages, regarding their syntactic resemblances.
- On the use of prosodic labelling in corpus-based linguistic studies of spontaneous speechPublication . Braga, Daniela; Freitas, Diamantino Silva; Teixeira, João Paulo; Marques, AldinaThis paper addresses the construction of a spontaneous speech cor-pus in European Portuguese (hereafter EP), the corpus is presented and a pro-sodic labeling scheme that is here proposed is explained. The objective of this work is to provide a tool for linguistic analysis suitable to several research top-ics, which have speech and dialogue as objects. The main features considered in the database will be described and justified. Methodological problems and some observed prosodic and pragmatic related phenomena deriving from the labeling of the speech signal are also presented. A discussion is done about some applications on pragmatic studies, speech synthesis and prosodic pho-nology. Our purpose is to make this work available to scientific community, since there isn’t any other database of this kind available and informatically accessible for EP. Future perspectives of the on-going work are also pre-viewed.
- Phonetic events from the labeling the european Portuguese database for speech synthesis, FEUP/IPB-DBPublication . Teixeira, João Paulo; Freitas, Diamantino Silva; Braga, Daniela; Barros, Maria João; Latsch, VagnerIn this paper a labeled new speech signal database (FEUP/IPB-DB) in Standard European Portuguese (hereafter SEP) is presented. The objective of this work is, on one hand, to provide phonetic material for Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems construction, either from the start or to improve the quality of existing ones, and, on the other hand, to place at service of the SEP scientific community a phonetically and prosodically valuable speech corpus, essential for Speech Synthesis or Phonetics research. Our purpose is to make it available for the scientific community, since there isn’t any other DB of its kind for EP. The main features of the database will be described as well as some basic statistical aspects. A discussion of some methodological problems and some observed phenomena in experimental phonetics deriving from the speech signal labeling is also done. The approach in our work is to produce a resource that can be further improved in subsequent steps with minimal re-work. The phonetic, linguistic and technical consistency are guaranteed through the involvement of a multidisciplinary team.
- PRO-GMÁTICA: uma base de dados prosódica pragmaticamente orientada em Português EuropeuPublication . Braga, Daniela; Teixeira, João Paulo; Coelho, Luís; Freitas, Diamantino SilvaNeste trabalho apresenta-se uma base de dados de fala espontânea com etiquetagem linguística, prosódica e pragmática em Português Europeu (PE). Esta informação pode ser encontrada num ficheiro de texto que é associado ao sinal de fala, sendo por isso possível analisar simultaneamente as várias dimensões em questão. O objectivo deste trabalho consiste em criar um corpus de fala etiquetado em que seja possível correlacionar a dimensão acústica e prosódica do sinal com o seu significado linguístico e pragmático, sobretudo tendo em atenção as dimensões emocionais e estilísticas do discurso. Constituem motivações subjacentes a este trabalho a necessidade de controlar a manipular a naturalidade da fala sintética, a necessidade de implementar emoção e atitude nos actuais sistemas síntese e reconhecimento de fala e a inexistência de corpora de fala espontânea linguística e prosodicamente etiquetada e que contemple as dimensões emocional e comunicativa. Neste artigo, faz-se uma breve introdução ao assunto em questão e apresenta-se o estado-da-arte das bases de dados em PE. Em seguida, descreve-se o processo da recolha da PRO-GMÁTICA e os critérios subjacentes à sua estruturação. Posteriormente, refere-se o tratamento e análise dos dados recolhidos, o que consiste basicamente no elenco e descrição dos níveis de etiquetagem considerados e na extracção dos parâmetros acústicos segundo o modelo Fujisaki. Finalmente, apresentam-se as conclusões e trabalhos futuros. Desta forma, pretendemos, num futuro próximo, vir a dotar os sistemas de síntese da fala e de diálogo homem-máquina em PE de uma dimensão mais pragmática.
- ProGmatica: a prosodic and pragmatic database for european portuguesePublication . Teixeira, João Paulo; Braga, Daniela; Coelho, Luís; Freitas, Diamantino SilvaIn this work, a spontaneous speech corpus of broadcasted television material in European Portuguese (EP) is presented. We decided to name it ProGmatica as it is meant to combine prosody information under a pragmatic framework. Our purpose is to analyse, describe and predict the prosodic patterns that are involved in speech acts and discourse events. It is also our goal to relate both prosody and pragmatics to emotion, style and attitude. In future developments, we intend, by this way, to provide EP TTS systems with pragmatic and emotional dimensions. From the whole recorded material we selected, extracted and saved prototypical speech acts with the help of speech analysis tools. We have a multi-speaker corpus, where linguistic, paralinguistic and extra linguistic information are labelled and related to each other. The paper is organized as follows. In section one, a brief state-of-the-art for the available EP corpora containing prosodic information is presented. In section two, we explain the pragmatic criteria used to structure this database. Then, we describe how the speech signal was labelled and which information layers were considered. In section three, we propose a prosodic prediction model to be applied to each speech act in future. In section four, some of the main problems we went through are discussed and future work is presented.
- A project of speech input and output in an e-commerce applicationPublication . Freitas, Diamantino Silva; Moura, António; Braga, Daniela; Ferreira, Hélder Pires; Teixeira, João Paulo; Barros, Maria João; Gouveia, Paulo D.F.; Latsch, VagnerThe present paper describes the work done during the last year in the development of European Portuguese (EP) speech recognition and synthesis channels for an Internet e-commerce application. The objective of this work was to develop the appropriate speech input and output, to enable the user to more comfortably use an e-commerce web site issuing commands and options under guidance of a menu system. The speech interface operation guidelines are briefly described in their principles and resulting specifications for the speech channels, namely, menu structure and operation dynamics, and in the following, the system software approach and the speech recognition and synthesis modules are presented. A discussion is done about some project trade-offs and results obtained so far. Future perspectives of the on-going work are also presented.