Sine-wave speech (SWS) is a three-tone replica of speech, conventionally created by matching each constituent sinusoid in amplitude and frequency with the corresponding vocal tract resonance (formant). We propose an alternative technique where we take a high-quality multicomponent sinusoidal representation and decimate this model so that there are only three components per frame. In contrast to...

In this paper, we present the work done in language identification for two air traffic control speech recognizers, one for continuous speech and the other one for a command interface. The system is able to distinguish between Spanish and English. We will confirm the advantage of using PPRLM over PRLM. All previous studies show that PPRLM is the technique with the best performance despite of its...

This paper proposes a voice activity detector (VAD) based on the complex Laplacian model. With the use of a goodness-of-fit (GOF) test, it is discovered that the Laplacian model is more suitable to describe noisy speech distribution than the conventional Gaussian model. The likelihood ratio (LR) based on the Laplacian model is computed and then applied to the VAD operation. According to the exp...

The Synface project is developing a synthetic talking face to aid the hearing impaired in telephone conversation. This report investigates the gain in intelligibility from the synthetic talking head when controlled by hand-annotated speech. Audio from Swedish, English and Dutch sentences was degraded to simulate the information losses that arise in severe-to-profound hearing impairment. 12 norm...

We consider a distributed power control scheme in a Spread Spectrum (SS) wireless ad hoc network, in which each user announces a price that reflects his current interference level. Given these prices, we present an asynchronous distributed algorithm for updating power levels, and provide conditions under which this algorithm converges to an optimal power allocation. We relate this algorithm to ...

COPD is a complex collection of conditions. All share the feature of limited expiratory air flow. It is a "disease" in the same sense as is "chronic renal failure." Like most other chronic organ failure "diseases," COPD has disparate causes, and patients are heterogeneous in their prognosis and response to treatment. Unlike many other diseases, the heterogeneity of COPD is just beginning to be ...

This paper describes some experiments with pronunciation modeling for spontaneous speech in European Portuguese. The transducer framework provides an elegant way to combine a pronunciation lexicon of canonical forms with alternative pronunciation rules. The main phonological aspects that the rules are intended to cover are: vowel devoicing, deletion and coalescence, voicing assimilation, and si...

In this paper, a semi-analytical approach for the 1 eigenproblem of circular plates with multiple circular holes is 2 presented. Natural frequencies and modes are determined by 3 employing the null-field integral formulation in conjunction 4 with degenerate kernels, tensor rotation and Fourier series. In 5 the proposed approach, all kernel functions are expanded into 6 degenerate (separable) fo...

A typical question for people dealing with administrative processes is: “When will my case be finished?”. In this paper, we show how this question can be answered, using historic information in the form of event logs of the systems supporting these administrative processes. Many information systems record information about activities performed for past cases in logs. Hence, to provide insights ...

In this paper a new pre-processor for a free speech transcription system is described. It performs a speech/non-speech partition, a segmentation of the speech parts into speaker turns, and a clustering of the speaker turns. It works in a stream-based mode, and it is aiming for a high accuracy with a low delay and processing time. Experiments on the Hub4 Broadcast News corpus show that the newly...