Modeling phonetic context is one of the key points to get natural sounding in concatenative speech synthesis. In this paper, a new quantitative method to model context has been proposed. In the proposed method, the context is measured as the distance between leafs of the top-down likelihood-based decision trees that have been grown during the construction of acoustic inventory. Unlike other con...

C278 P.05.08.4 Acta Cryst. (2005). A61, C278 Synthesis and Structural Characterization of 3-(4-fluorophenyl)2-( -naphtyl)-1,3-thiazolidin-4-one José Luis Pinto Camargo, J. A. Henao, W. Rodríguez, V. V. Kouznetsov, Grupo de Investigación en Química Estructural, Centro de Investigación en Biomoléculas “CIBIMOL”, Escuela de Química, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Industrial de Santander, A. A. ...

The use of subject pronouns by bilingual speakers using both a pro-drop and a non-pro-drop language (e.g. Spanish heritage speakers in the USA) is a well-studied topic in research on cross-linguistic influence in language contact situations. Previous studies looking at bilinguals with different proficiency levels have yielded conflicting results on whether there is transfer from the non-pro-dro...

For applications such as video games and virtual walk-throughs, on-line locomotion control is an important issue. In general, the user prescribes a sequence of motions one by one while providing an input trajectory. Since the input trajectory lacks in human characteristics, one may not synthesize quality motions by blindly following it. In this paper, we present a novel data-driven scheme for t...

In order to obtain more human like sounding humanmachine interfaces we must first be able to give them expressive capabilities in the way of emotional and stylistic features so as to closely adequate them to the intended task. If we want to replicate those features it is not enough to merely replicate the prosodic information of fundamental frequency and speaking rhythm. The proposed additional...

Because most practical logic design algorithms produce irredundant sum-of-products (ISOP) expressions, the understanding of ISOPs is crucial. We show a class of functions for which Morreale-Minato ’s ISOP generation algorithm produces worst ISOPs (WSOP), ISOPs with the most product terms. We show this class has the property that the ratio of the number of products in the WSOP to the number in t...

The paper addresses the issue of making Virtual Humans unique and typical of some (social or ethnical) group, by endowing them with style. First a conceptual framework of defining style is discussed, identifying how style is manifested in speech and nonverbal communication. Then the GESTYLE language is introduced, making it possible to define the style of a VH in terms of Style Dictionaries, as...

Synthesis is the automated construction of a system from its specification. The system has to satisfy its specification in all possible environments. Modern systems often interact with other systems, or agents. Many times these agents have objectives of their own, other than to fail the system. Thus, it makes sense to model system environments not as hostile, but as composed of rational agents;...

Reproducing the smooth vocal tract trajectories is critical for high quality articulatory speech synthesis. This paper presents an adaptive neural control scheme based on fuzzy logic and neural networks. The control scheme estimates motor commands from trajectories of flesh-points on selected articulators. These motor commands are then used to reproduce the trajectories based on 2nd order dynam...

Currently, a lot of research in the field of intelligent tutoring systems is concerned with recognising student’s emotions and affects. The recognition is done by extracting features from information sources like speech, typing and mouse clicking behaviour or physiological sensors. In former work we proposed some low-level speech features for perceived task difficulty recognition in intelligent...