230389 Linguistic Components for Speech Synthesis (S) (SoSe 2005)

Speech synthesis is a field which combines several areas of linguistic knowledge with speech processing, and which has practical applications in many areas: talking books for the blind, information posts in pre-literate areas of the third world, telephone information services, and public announcements of many kinds.

The class will start with an introduction to basic principles of speech synthesis, and an overview of the signal processing methods involved. However, the class will not deal with signal processing; ready-made signal processing components will be used. The focus of the class is on the linguistic information required as input to the signal processing components, for example syntax (for the analysis of text), morphology (for the assignment of word stress and pronunciation), phonology and phonetics (for the assignment of correct sounds and durations), and prosody (in particular accent and intonation, for pitch assignment).

The emphasis of the class will be practical: we will use ready-made speech databases and synthesis software, and will construct programs for creating the input to this software, using basic computational linguistic and text technological techniques. For anyone who wants to do a term-paper or a thesis, this work can be extended into a project for making your own synthesiser for a language of your choice.

The class is suitable for students with basic computer experience (but who are willing to learn more), as well as for students of computational linguistics and text technology. In order to use different levels of computational skill, emphasis will be placed on work-sharing and teamwork. The class will be held either in English, German or both. Check my website for further information.

Qualifications (credits etc.) will be discussed according to individual needs, at the beginning of the semester.

Basic reading for the course is the following introduction:

Thierry Dutoit (1997). An Introduction to Text-To-Speech Synthesis. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. ISBN 0-7923-4498-7.

Externe Kommentarseite

http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/~gibbon/index.html