selection of suitable features for modeling the durations of syllables选择合适的功能建模音节的持续时间.pdfVIP

J. Software Engineering Applications, 2010, 3, 1107-1117 doi:10.4236/jsea.2010.312129 Published Online December 2010 (/journal/jsea) Selection of Suitable Features for Modeling the Durations of Syllables Krothapalli S. Rao, Shashidhar G. Koolagudi School of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. Email: ksrao@iitkgp.ac.in, koolagudi@ Received November 7th, 2010, revised November 21th, 2010, accepted December 7th, 2010. ABSTRACT Acoustic analysis and synthesis experiments have shown that duration and intonation patterns are the two most impor- tant prosodic features responsible for the quality of synthesized speech. In this paper a set of features are proposed which will influence the duration patterns of the sequence of the sound units. These features are derived from the results of the duration analysis. Duration analysis provides a rough estimate of features, which affect the duration patterns of the sequence of the sound units. But, the prediction of durations from these features using either linear models or with a fixed rulebase is not accurate. From the analysis it is obser ved that there exists a gross trend in durations of syllables with respect to syllable position in the phrase, syllable position in the word, word position in the phrase, syllable iden- tity and the context of the syllable (preceding and the following syllables ). These features can be further used to predict the durations of the syllables more accurately by exploring various nonlinear models. For analying the durations of sound units, broadcast news data in Telugu is used as the speech corpus. The prediction accuracy of the duration mod- els developed using rulebases and neural networks is evaluated using the objective measures such as percentage of syl- lables predicted within the specified deviation, average prediction error (µ), standard deviation (σ) and correlation coefficient (γ). Keywo