Pronunciation by analogy (PbA) is a data-driven method for relating letters to sound, with potential application to next-generation text-to-speech systems. This paper extends previous work on PbA in several directions. First, we have included "full" pattern matching between input letter string and dictionary entries, as well as including lexical stress in letter-to-phoneme conversion. Second, w...

Considerable evidence suggests that a viewer’s perception of the 3D shape of a polygonally-defined object can be significantly affected (either masked or enhanced) by the presence of a surface texture pattern. However, investigations into the specific mechanisms of texture’s effect on shape perception are still ongoing and the question of how to design and apply a texture pattern to a surface i...

This paper investigates the use of shape-from-shading for coarse view synthesis. The aim of our study is to determine whether needle-maps delivered by a new shape-from-shading (SFS) algorithm can be used as a compact object-representation for the purposes of e3ciently generating appearance manifolds. Speci4cally, we aim to show that the needle-maps can be used to generate novel object views und...

For emotional speech synthesis, a quantitative model giving a parametric representation of F0 contours is needed. Purpose: investigate quantitatively F0 characteristics of Mandarin speech in four basic emotions (anger, fear, joy, and sadness) and in neutral reading. Two approaches are compared: surface features analysis from time-normalized F0 contours analysis-by-synthesis of time-intact F0 co...

In this paper we describe the system proposed by Telefonica research for the Spoken Web Search (SWS) task [3] within the Mediaeval 2013 evaluation. This is the third year we participate in the evaluation and this time we have submitted a system based on the recently proposed Information Retrieval-based Dynamic Time Warping (IR-DTW) Algorithm. This algorithm performs a pattern matching search at...

Alternative wiring techniques have been shown to be very useful for many EDA problems. The currently used rewiring techniques are mainly ATPG based. In this paper, we study the approach of applying purely graph-based local pattern search methods in locating alternative wires. The method searches minimal graph patterns containing alternative wires that limited to 2 edges distant from the target ...

In this Perspective, the value of small molecule natural products (SMNPs) in the discovery of active biological agents is discussed. The usefulness of the natural products-based method of potential pharma discovery is much augmented by the capacities of chemical synthesis. The great advances in synthetic methodology allow for major editing of the natural product in the hopes of optimizing poten...

This paper discusses an emotional prosody generator for a Malay speech synthesis system that can re-synthesize the selected vocal emotion from neutral synthesized speech output and improve the naturalness by adopting rulebased prosody conversion techniques. The role of prosodic features in emotional expression, particularly fundamental frequency and duration, has been widely investigated in sev...

In order to make a CALL system to detect lexical pitch accent errors, we are developing a multi-level pitch pattern recognition algorithm. With this method, it is possible to detect a wider range of pitch accent errors than with previous methods and it is possible to have more flexibility in displaying the pitch pattern to the learner. This rule-based method is based on perceptual experiments i...

A pattern synthesis method for arbitrary arrays based on the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) criterion is presented. Given mainlobe regions and an arbitrary sidelobe envelope, this algorithm searches the pattern with the lowest sidelobe levels. Its iteration coefficient is robust to synthesis conditions, and patterns with a flat top mainlobe can be obtained using phase-independent ...