Related papers: Speech Intention Understanding in a Head-final Lan…
Most human interactions occur in the form of spoken conversations where the semantic meaning of a given utterance depends on the context. Each utterance in spoken conversation can be represented by many semantic and speaker attributes, and…
For machine reading comprehension, the capacity of effectively modeling the linguistic knowledge from the detail-riddled and lengthy passages and getting ride of the noises is essential to improve its performance. Traditional attentive…
This paper links prosody to the information in a text and how it is processed by the speaker. It describes the operation and output of LOQ, a text-to-speech implementation that includes a model of limited attention and working memory.…
In view of the fact that most of the existing machine translation evaluation algorithms only consider the lexical and syntactic information, but ignore the deep semantic information contained in the sentence, this paper proposes a…
Recent advancements in machine learning have significantly improved speech recognition, but recognizing speech from non-fluent or accented speakers remains a challenge. Previous efforts, relying on rule-based pronunciation patterns, have…
Every speech signal carries implicit information about the emotions, which can be extracted by speech processing methods. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for extracting features that are independent from the spoken language and the…
Natural language exhibits various universal properties. But why do these universals exist? One explanation is that they arise from functional pressures to achieve efficient communication, a view which attributes cross-linguistic properties…
This paper focuses on simulating text dialogues in which impressions between speakers improve during speed dating. This simulation involves selecting an utterance from multiple candidates generated by a text generation model that replicates…
Acoustic-prosodic entrainment describes the tendency of humans to align or adapt their speech acoustics to each other in conversation. This alignment of spoken behavior has important implications for conversational success. However,…
This paper is motivated by the automation of neuropsychological tests involving discourse analysis in the retellings of narratives by patients with potential cognitive impairment. In this scenario the task of sentence boundary detection in…
The goal of this thesis is to advance the exploration of the statistical language learning design space. In pursuit of that goal, the thesis makes two main theoretical contributions: (i) it identifies a new class of designs by specifying an…
The present contribution is a tutorial on selected aspects of prosody, the rhythms and melodies of speech, based on a course of the same name at the Summer School on Contemporary Phonetics and Phonology at Tongji University, Shanghai, China…
End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) systems have many advantages over conventional pipeline systems, but collecting in-domain speech data to train an end-to-end system is costly and time consuming. One question arises from this:…
We propose prosody embeddings for emotional and expressive speech synthesis networks. The proposed methods introduce temporal structures in the embedding networks, thus enabling fine-grained control of the speaking style of the synthesized…
Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…
In this thesis, we present a statistical language model for resolving speech repairs, intonational boundaries and discourse markers. Rather than finding the best word interpretation for an acoustic signal, we redefine the speech recognition…
In language learning in the limit, the most common type of hypothesis is to give an enumerator for a language. This so-called $W$-index allows for naming arbitrary computably enumerable languages, with the drawback that even the membership…
Recent studies on pronunciation scoring have explored the effect of introducing phone embeddings as reference pronunciation, but mostly in an implicit manner, i.e., addition or concatenation of reference phone embedding and actual…
A statistical classification algorithm and its application to language identification from noisy input are described. The main innovation is to compute confidence limits on the classification, so that the algorithm terminates when enough…
Parsing spoken dialogue poses unique difficulties, including disfluencies and unmarked boundaries between sentence-like units. Previous work has shown that prosody can help with parsing disfluent speech (Tran et al. 2018), but has assumed…