Title:
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Speech transduction based on linguistic content
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Author:
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Christiansen, Thomas Ulrich; Juel Henrichsen, Peter |
Abstract:
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Digital hearing aids use a variety of advanced digital signal processing methods in order to improve
speech intelligibility. These methods are based on knowledge about the acoustics outside the ear as well
as psychoacoustics. This paper investigates the recent observation that speech elements with a high
degree of information can be robustly identified based on basic acoustic properties, i.e., function words
have greater spectral tilt than content words for each of the 18 Danish talkers investigated. In this paper
we examine these spectral tilt differences as a function of time based on a speech material six times the
duration of previous investigations. Our results show that the correlation of spectral tilt with information
content is relatively constant across time, even if averaged across talkers. This indicates that it is possible
to devise a robust method for estimating information density in the speech signal based on
computationally simple short-term band-level differences. The principle described here has the potential
to improve speech transduction in hearing aids and cochlear implants. In addition, the concept of
information-based speech transduction may also be applicable in automatic speech recognition systems. |
URI:
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http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8617
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Date:
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2013-01-10 |
Notes:
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paper presented at BNAM2012, joint Baltic-Nordic Acoustics Meeting, June 18-20, 2012. Odense, Denmark. |