Comparison of Spectral Properties of Read, Prepared and Casual Speech in French

Jean-Luc Rouas, Mayumi Beppu, Martine Adda-Decker


Abstract
In this paper, we investigate the acoustic properties of phonemes in three speaking styles: read speech, prepared speech and spontaneous speech. Our aim is to better understand why speech recognition systems still fails to achieve good performances on spontaneous speech. This work follows the work of Nakamura et al. on Japanese speaking styles, with the difference that we here focus on French. Using Nakamura's method, we use classical speech recognition features, MFCC, and try to represent the effects of the speaking styles on the spectral space. Two measurements are defined in order to represent the spectral space reduction and the spectral variance extension. Experiments are then carried on to investigate if indeed we find some differences between the three speaking styles using these measurements. We finally compare our results to those obtained by Nakamura on Japanese to see if the same phenomenon appears. We happen to find some cues, and it also seems that phone duration also plays an important role regarding spectral reduction, especially for spontaneous speech.
Anthology ID:
L10-1489
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Venue:
LREC
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Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/704_Paper.pdf
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Cite (ACL):
Jean-Luc Rouas, Mayumi Beppu, and Martine Adda-Decker. 2010. Comparison of Spectral Properties of Read, Prepared and Casual Speech in French. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Comparison of Spectral Properties of Read, Prepared and Casual Speech in French (Rouas et al., LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/704_Paper.pdf