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A recent International Civil Aviation Organization initiative mandates that pilots and air-traffic controllers operating on international routes demonstrate adequate English-language proficiency for successful communication. The Versant Aviation English Test was developed to serve this purpose. It is a fully automated speaking and listening performance test, where administration of the test tasks...
This paper presents efficient algorithms for optimal and suboptimal unconditional maximum likelihood (UML) directions-of-arrival (DOA) finding. In the conventional UML formulation an important condition is missing. That is the non-negative definiteness of the covariance matrix of signal components. Because of the lack of the important condition, inadequate global solution appears in the solution space...
Automatic estimation of pronunciation proficiency has its specific difficulty. Adequacy in controlling the vocal organs can be estimated from spectral envelopes of input utterances but the envelope patterns are also affected easily by different speakers. To develop a pedagogically sound method for automatic estimation, the envelope changes caused by linguistic factors and those by extra-linguistic...
This paper proposes hidden structure model (HSM) for statistical modeling of sequence data. The HSM generalizes our previous proposal on structural representation by introducing hidden states and probabilistic models. Compared with the previous structural representation, HSM not only can solve the problem of misalignment of events, but also can conduct structure-based decoding, which allows us to...
In this paper, investigate the relation between emotions represented by speech and features included in speech. There are two kinds of approaches in comparing experiment. Firstly, speech data are non-verbal such as white-noise, sine wave and vowel /a:/, so that investigate the relation between emotions and prosodic features only. Secondly, speech data include verbal information such as `ohayou'(hello),...
This paper proposes a set of affine invariant features (AIFs) for sequence data. The proposed AIFs can be calculated directly from the sequence data, and their invariance to affine transformation is proved mathematically through algebraic calculation. We apply the AIFs to speech recognition. Since the vocal tract length (VTL) difference causes to frequency warping which can be approximated well by...
In this paper, we describe a system for intonation evaluation of English utterance by Japanese native speakers using synthesized speech for rapid development of a CALL system. To evaluate the intonation of learners' utterance, we need reference utterances, for which English native speakers' utterances should be used. However, it is costly to gather native speakers' utterances for all sentences in...
PLSA is one of the most powerful language models for adaptation to a target speech. The vocabulary divided PLSA language model (VD-PLSA) shows higher performance than the conventional PLSA model because it can be adapted to the target topic and the target speaking style individually. However, all of the vocabulary must be manually divided into three categories (topic, speaking style, and general category)...
Language model adaptation using text data downloaded from the WWW is an efficient way to train a topic-specific LM. We are developing an unsupervised LM adaptation method using data in the Web. The one key point of unsupervised Web-based LM adaptation is how to select keywords to compose the search query. In this paper, we propose a new method of selecting keywords from keyword candidates, which uses...
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