A control-theoretic model of speech production and recognition for use within prosthetic communication devices

用于假肢通信设备的语音产生和识别的控制理论模型

• 批准号: 435874-2013
• 负责人: Rudzicz, Frank
• 金额: $ 1.46万
• 依托单位: University of Toronto
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2015-01-01 至 2016-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=574208
• 关键词: control; theoretic; model; speech; production

Millions of people in North America have some sort of speech disorder. Many of these have normal mental abilities and are able to process language, but they lack normal control over the muscles used in speech (such as the lips and tongue), resulting in speech that can be very difficult or even impossible to understand. Other individuals have cognitive disorders (for example, caused by Alzheimer's disease) where it becomes difficult to understand what is being said, to remember the right words, or to produce sentences. I am starting a new lab called SPOClab whose purpose is to produce software to help people with disabilities communicate. Our goal is to improve the core technology in speech recognition and to use that technology within applications that help people in their daily lives. Improving speech recognition for individuals with speech and language disorders will involve fundamentally changing the way speech recognition is done currently, because modern speech recognition simply doesn't work properly for very different kinds of speech. Our new way of doing speech recognition will involve teaching the computer to understand how speech is physically produced. For example, if the computer knows that the speaker tried to close their lips, it becomes easier to tell the 'm' sound in 'map' apart from the 'n' sound in 'nap'. The advanced speech recognition developed in SPOClab will be used to help people communicate. For example, we will transform hard-to-understand speech signals to be more intelligible to human listeners and we will use video as a mode of input to computer applications. This technology can have a tremendous positive impact for many Canadians, including those Canadians for whom a loss of linguistic abilities accompanies ageing.

北美有数百万人患有某种语言障碍。他们中的许多人有正常的心智能力，能够处理语言，但他们缺乏对说话时使用的肌肉（如嘴唇和舌头）的正常控制，导致讲话非常困难，甚至无法理解。另一些人有认知障碍（例如，由阿尔茨海默病引起的），他们很难理解所说的话，记住正确的单词，或者造句子。