Språkteknologiska delområden VT96:17

Classes: 17 & 18
Dates:   960228 & 960230
Topic:   Practical exercise Speech Processing 2

Practical exercise Speech Processing 2

In this exercise you will adapt the speech dictionary of the Ultimedia Services (UMS) speech software in such a way that it can pronounce a small piece of Swedish text in a reasonable way. You will write a small report about this exercise. The mark you will receive for the report and the adapted dictionary will be your mark for the speech processing part of this course. You can either do this exercise on your own or work in a pair.

Introduction

In the previous practical exercise you have performed text-to-speech conversion by using the X-windows application speak with the talking head. UMS also has a facility for performing text-to-speech conversion by using simple commands. You can for example type:

echo "i Uppsala" | txt2spch

after which you will hear the prepositional phrase "i Uppsala". You may want to adjust the volume of the speech output. This can be done by starting the Master Volume application:

volume

You will have noticed that the pronunciation of the Swedish preposition "i" is incorrect. The software will pronounce this preposition as the English pronoun "I". Fortunately it is possible to change this. The software makes use of a speech dictionary which can be editted:

run_ums dictedit

This command will start the dictionary editor. If the characters in this editor have an incorrect size you will have to do the following:

• Quit from the dictedit program.
• Add the line "dictedit*fontList: fixed" to the file $HOME/.dt/sessions/current/dt.resources or if you are one of fredriko, henrikw, ljo or ovea add that line to $HOME/.dt/sessions/home/dt.resources
• Restart your windows manager.
• Restart the dictedit program.

You can choose an arbitrary word from the Dictionary Contents field by clicking on the word. It will appear in the top field and a phonetic representation of the word will appear under it. You can make the program pronounce the word or the phonetic representation. You can modify the entry or delete it.

The word "i" does not have an entry in the dictionary so we will add it:

• Enter "i" in the English Word field.
• Enter "<<~IY>>" in the Sounds like field.
• Test the pronunciation to verify that this is the sound you are looking for.
• Click on Insert Entry to insert the entry in the dictionary
• Click on Save Dictionary to save the dictionary in one of your own directories. Warning: don't save the dictionary in the default system directory. You will not get any error message and the dictionary will be lost.

setenv TTSDICTIONARY yourFile
echo "i Uppsala" | txt2spch

Assignment

Your teacher has a series envelopes containing a paper with a small piece of Swedish text. There is one envelope per student. Get one one of these. Your task is to adapt the dictionary of the UMS software in such a way that it can pronounce that piece of Swedish text in a reasonable way. You do not need to specify all words of your text in the dictionary. It might be so that some words are pronounced correctly already. You can make this assignment on your own or work in a pair.

Tips

1. You cannot use the three vowels å, ä and ö in the dictionary because the speech software will not pronounce them and treat them as word boundaries. You may choose as alternatives: a for å, a for ä and o for ö. If this gets you into trouble please consult the teacher so we can choose the same solution for everyone.
2. In order to make this assignment you will need a list of phonemes that can be used in the dictionary and a list of words that are present in the English dictionary. If you do not know what phoneme to use for a Swedish word, try to think of English word which has a similar phoneme and use the phoneme which has been used in the dictionary for that word.

Report

You will have to write a report of at least two pages (three if you work in a pair) about this assignment. Your report should contain at least the following parts:

1. Introduction: a description of your task in this assignment.
2. Speech synthesis in Swedish: here you describe what you have done, what things you couldn't find a satisfactory solution for and the things that could be solved properly.
3. Concluding remarks: general conclusions about the assignment you have done and your expectations for the development of speech synthesis in the future.

You can add your Swedish dictionary entries to the report in an appendix on a seperate page. You can write your report in English or in Swedish. Your report and your extended dictionary will be graded with a mark between 1 and 10 (inclusive). The deadline for handing in the reports is Friday March 22, 1996. Reports handed in after that day will receive a 1 point penalty per extra day.