Abstract
Expressiveness and non-verbal information in speech are active research topics in speech processing. In this work, we are interested in detecting emphasis at word-level as a mean to identify what are the focus words in a given utterance. We compare several machine learning techniques (Linear Discriminant Analysis, Support Vector Machines, Neural Networks) for this task carried out on SIWIS, a French speech synthesis database. Our approach consists first in aligning the spoken words to the speech signal and second to feed classifier with filter bank coefficients in order to take a binary decision at word-level: neutral/emphasized. Evaluation results show that a three-layer neural network performed best with a \(93\%\) accuracy.
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Heba, A., Pellegrini, T., Jorquera, T., André-Obrecht, R., Lorré, JP. (2017). Lexical Emphasis Detection in Spoken French Using F-BANKs and Neural Networks. In: Camelin, N., Estève, Y., Martín-Vide, C. (eds) Statistical Language and Speech Processing. SLSP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10583. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68456-7_20
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