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SUMMARY:Tracheoesophageal Speech Repair - Arantza Del Pozo\, CUED Machine 
 Intelligence Laboratory
DTSTART:20061120T130000Z
DTEND:20061120T140000Z
UID:TALK5928@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Marcus Tomalin
DESCRIPTION:Tracheoesophageal (TE) speech is the most frequently used voic
 e restoration technique after total laryngectomy. Despite being often cite
 d as the alaryngeal speech alternative most comparable to normal\, its qua
 lity and intelligibility are still significantly lower than laryngeal spee
 ch. Excitation and prosodic deviations are thought to be the main limitati
 ons responsible for its quality reduction. This seminar will describe exci
 tation and duration repair systems developed for the enhancement of contin
 uous TE speech. The excitation repair system \nresynthesises TE speech usi
 ng a synthetic glottal waveform\, reduces its jitter and shimmer and appli
 es a novel spectral smoothing and tilt correction algorithm. For duration 
 repair\, TE phone durations are modified based on the predictions of regre
 ssion trees built from non-pathological data. The perceptual enhancement o
 f each system is evaluated using listening tests. Results show that the re
 paired  sentences are preferred to the original overall in terms of breath
 iness\, harshness and rhythmic naturalness.
LOCATION:LR6\, Engineering Department\, Baker Building
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