Computing PROSODY: Computational Models for Processing Spontaneous Speech - Tapa blanda

This book presents a collection of papers from the Spring 1995 Work­ shop on Computational Approaches to Processing the Prosody of Spon­ taneous Speech, hosted by the ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Re­ search Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan. The workshop brought together lead­ ing researchers in the fields of speech and signal processing, electrical en­ gineering, psychology, and linguistics, to discuss aspects of spontaneous speech prosody and to suggest approaches to its computational analysis and modelling. The book is divided into four sections. Part I gives an overview and theoretical background to the nature of spontaneous speech, differentiating it from the lab-speech that has been the focus of so many earlier analyses. Part II focuses on the prosodic features of discourse and the structure of the spoken message, Part ilIon the generation and modelling of prosody for computer speech synthesis. Part IV discusses how prosodic information can be used in the context of automatic speech recognition. Each section of the book starts with an invited overview paper to situate the chapters in the context of current research. We feel that this collection of papers offers interesting insights into the scope and nature of the problems concerned with the computational analysis and modelling of real spontaneous speech, and expect that these works will not only form the basis of further developments in each field but also merge to form an integrated computational model of prosody for a better understanding of human processing of the complex interactions of the speech chain.

The contributions to this volume represent the state of the art of computational analysis and modeling of spontaneous speech. Many research laboratories around the world are now working on methods of processing natural speech, so that machines can interpret what people say, rather than making people adapt their speech to a style that machines can understand. The book is in four main sections. The first gives the theoretical background and discusses how spontaneous speech differs from the laboratory-speech that has been the focus of most earlier analyses. The next part focuses on prosody and the structure of the spoken message, and the third discusses the generation and modeling of prosody for speech synthesis. The concluding part considers the use of prosodic information in automatic speech recognition. Each part begins with an overview of the field; other chapters are based on a workshop on computational approaches to processing spontaneous speech and represent the current state of research.