Loredana Schettino , Antonio Origlia , Francesco Cutugno
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
This study presents the results of two perception experiments aimed at evaluating the effect that specific patterns of disfluencies have on people listening to synthetic speech. We consider the particular case of Cultural Heritage presentations and propose a linguistic model to support the positioning of disfluencies throughout the utterances in the Italian language. A state-of-the-art speech synthesizer, based on Deep Neural Networks, is used to prepare a set of experimental stimuli and two different experiments are presented to provide both subjective evaluations and behavioural assessments from human subjects. Results show that synthetic utterances including disfluencies, predicted by a linguistic model, are identified as more natural and that the presence of disfluencies benefits the listeners’ recall of the provided information.
期刊介绍:
Computer Speech & Language publishes reports of original research related to the recognition, understanding, production, coding and mining of speech and language.
The speech and language sciences have a long history, but it is only relatively recently that large-scale implementation of and experimentation with complex models of speech and language processing has become feasible. Such research is often carried out somewhat separately by practitioners of artificial intelligence, computer science, electronic engineering, information retrieval, linguistics, phonetics, or psychology.