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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/L25639/01
Title: AUTOMATIC CUE-ENHANCEMENT OF NATURAL SPEECH FOR IMPROVED INTELLIGBILITY
Principal Investigator: Hazan, Professor VL
Other Investigators:
Huckvale, Professor MA
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Phonetics and Linguistics
Organisation: UCL
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 01 December 1996 Ends: 30 April 2000 Value (£): 175,771
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Human Communication in ICT
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
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Summary on Grant Application Form
This project aims to increase the intelligibility of the speech signal prior to degradation. Applications are a) in telecommunications where a clear signal must be subsequently degraded due to characteristics of the communication channel and b) in computer-based speech training, where training with enhanced speech can help improve speech perception in clients with certain speech and language disabilities and second-language learners. Our phonetically-motivated approach focuses on enhancing 'landmark' regions of the speech signal rich in acoustic cues. These regions are manipulated to increase their perceptual salience. At present, our successful enhancement techniques require that these regions be manually annotated. The proposed programme will involve the automatic identification of these information-bearing regions and their subsequent enhancement. The effect of region-identification accuracy on the intelligibility of the enhanced speech will be evaluated, and further adjustments to current enhancement strategies made to take into account the greater acoustic-cue variability in fluent speech by a wide variety of speakers. In the final phase of the work, the automatic cue-enhancer will be evaluated in a simulation of a telephone-based talking yellow-pages application.
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