In this paper, syllable-based prosody modelings of pitch contour and syllable duration for isolated Mandarin words are proposed. In the syllable pitch contour model, three main affecting factors of tone, syllable position in word, and inter-syllable coarticulation are considered. These three affecting factors are assumed to be independent and additive. Similarly, in the syllable duration model,...

Story segmentation of news broadcasts has been shown to improve the accuracy of the subsequent processes such as question answering and information retrieval. In previous work, a decision tree trained on automatically extracted lexical and acoustic features was trained to predict story boundaries, using hypothesized sentence boundaries to define potential story boundaries. In this paper, we emp...

This paper investigates the combined use of pause duration and pitch reset for automatic story segmentation in Mandarin broadcast news. Analysis shows that story boundaries cannot be clearly discriminated from utterance boundaries by speaker-normalized pitch reset due to its large variations across different syllable tone pairs. Instead, speakerand tonenormalized pitch reset can provide a clear...

The order of stages in a multistage game is often interpreted by looking at earlier stages as involving more long term decisions. For the purpose of making this interpretation precise, the notion of a delay supergame of a bounded multistage game is introduced. A multistage game is bounded if the length of play has an upper bound. A delay supergame is played over many periods. Decisions on all s...

This paper discusses and reviews the use of super-eciency approach in data envelopment analysis (DEA) sensitivity analyses. It is shown that super-eciency score can be decomposed into two data perturbation components of a particular test frontier decision making unit (DMU) and the remaining DMUs. As a result, DEA sensitivity analysis can be done in (1) a general situation where data for a tes...

It is well-known that production scheduling can be largely categorized into open and closed-shops (Graves (1981)). Open-shops are job-shops, flow-shops, machine-shops and project-shops and deal exclusively with the assignment, sequencing and timing decisions (Pinedo (1995)). Closed-shops on the other hand also deal with the same three decision-groups as open-shops but they also must decide on t...

Acoustic confusions degrade the accuracy of pronunciation assessment severely in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems. This paper presents our recent study on optimal modeling of the acoustic confusions. We change the traditional mandarin syllable structure, which is composed of initial and final, to a novel phoneme structure. Several phoneme splitting strategies are investigated,...

A model of cooperation versus defection in a sequence of games is analysed under the assumptions that the rules of the game are randomly changed from one encounter to another, that the decisions are to be made each time anew, according to the (random) rules of the specific local game, and that the result of one such game affects the ability of a player to participate and thus, cooperate in the ...

This paper reports the IR’s submission to the Blizzard Challenge 2008. This is our first participation in Blizzard Challenge. In this paper, we describe the approach that we used to build the three required voices. We introduced the acoustic parameters that include MFCC coefficients as spectral parameters in addition to the prosodic parameters for unit selection based speech synthesis. We used ...