| EPSRC Reference: |
GR/K84356/01 |
| Title: |
AN ANNOTATED SPEECH DATABASE FOR WELSH AND ITS APPLICATION IN SPEECH TECHNOLOGY |
| Principal Investigator: |
Isard, Mr S |
| Other Investigators: |
|
| Researcher Co-Investigators: |
|
| Project Partners: |
|
| Department: |
Centre for Speech Technology Research |
| Organisation: |
University of Edinburgh |
| Scheme: |
Standard Research (Pre-FEC) |
| Starts: |
01 October 1996 |
Ends: |
31 March 2000 |
Value (£): |
222,462
|
| EPSRC Research Topic Classifications: |
| Human Communication in ICT |
|
|
| EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications: |
|
| Related Grants: |
|
| Panel History: |
|
|
Summary on Grant Application Form |
|
A Welsh speech corpus will be recorded using eight subjects drawn from the main dialect areas of Wales, and will be annotated at relevant linguistic levels. The levels are: Acoustic-Phonetics Unit, broad phonemic unit, syllable, word, phonological phrase and intonational phrase. A statistical analysis of the acoustic characteristics of the speech sound and prosody will be carried out.The results of this analysis will yield rules for improving the intonation and duration in a Welsh speech synthesiser previously developed by B Williams. The analysis will also throw light on a long-standing puzzle concerning word stress in Welsh. This will contribute to the debate on the possible forms of linguistic stress in language in general. Thirdly, the analysis will yield basic information on the acoustic characteristics of Welsh speech sounds, which to date have been very little researched.The intonation and duration rules will then be implemented in the existing Welsh synthesiser, as a demonstration of their effectiveness compared to the existing English-based rules. The corpus will then be used to train and test a set of HMMs to demonstrate its potential in research towards a Welsh speech recogniser. These HMMs will be tested with a small selection of speakers.
|
|
Key Findings |
|
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
|
|
Potential use in non-academic contexts |
|
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
|
|
Impacts |
|
| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
| Summary |
|
| Date Materialised |
|
|
|
|
Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
|
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
|
| Project URL: |
|
| Further Information: |
|
| Organisation Website: |
http://www.ed.ac.uk |