A Snack Implementation and Tcl/Tk Interface to the Fundamental Frequency Variation Spectrum Algorithm

Kornel Laskowski, Jens Edlund


Abstract
Intonation is an important aspect of vocal production, used for a variety of communicative needs. Its modeling is therefore crucial in many speech understanding systems, particularly those requiring inference of speaker intent in real-time. However, the estimation of pitch, traditionally the first step in intonation modeling, is computationally inconvenient in such scenarios. This is because it is often, and most optimally, achieved only after speech segmentation and recognition. A consequence is that earlier speech processing components, in today’s state-of-the-art systems, lack intonation awareness by fiat; it is not known to what extent this circumscribes their performance. In the current work, we present a freely available implementation of an alternative to pitch estimation, namely the computation of the fundamental frequency variation (FFV) spectrum, which can be easily employed at any level within a speech processing system. It is our hope that the implementation we describe aid in the understanding of this novel acoustic feature space, and that it facilitate its inclusion, as desired, in the front-end routines of speech recognition, dialog act recognition, and speaker recognition systems.
Anthology ID:
L10-1396
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/576_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kornel Laskowski and Jens Edlund. 2010. A Snack Implementation and Tcl/Tk Interface to the Fundamental Frequency Variation Spectrum Algorithm. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Snack Implementation and Tcl/Tk Interface to the Fundamental Frequency Variation Spectrum Algorithm (Laskowski & Edlund, LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/576_Paper.pdf