Presidential Young Investigator Award (PYI): Computer Research

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This Presidential Young Investigator Award is for support of Mary Beckman at the Ohio State University. Her research is aimed at understanding and modeling the prosodic patterns which organize speech into coherent units of sound. Earlier work, including most exisitng speech synthesis systems and all speech recognition systems, is based on linguistic theories from the 1960s, which posited only a single type of organizational unit, the phonetic segment, which constituted the informational primitives. More recently, however, linguists have recognized that the prosodic patterns of intonation and stress organize speech into units of various sizes. A computational model based on those theories would take advantage of the way prosodic patterns encode a hierarchy of phonological words and phrases. Such a model would make constructive use of the variation in spectral patterning that accrues from a segment's position in the organizational structure to recover the higher-level informational structure. The significance of this work is that it should yield a computational model for timing patterns that will be implemented in an articulatory synthesis program and ultimately will be incorporated into an automatic speech recognition system, thus bringing a new set of tools to bear on a difficult problem area.