LSESpeak: A spoken language generator for Deaf people

详细信息    查看全文

• 作者：Veró ; nica Ló ; pez-Ludeñ ; a ; ^{veronicalopez@die.upm.es} ; Roberto Barra-Chicote ; Syaheerah Lutfi ; Juan Manuel Montero ; Rubé ; n San-Segundo
• 关键词：Spanish sign language ; LSE ; Lengua de Signos Españ ; ola ; SMS to Spanish translation ; Speech generation from LSE ; Emotional speech synthesis
• 刊名：Expert Systems with Applications
• 出版年：2013
• 出版时间：March, 2013
• 年：2013
• 卷：40
• 期：4
• 页码：1283-1295
• 全文大小：1415 K

文摘

This paper describes the development of LSESpeak, a spoken Spanish generator for Deaf people. This system integrates two main tools: a sign language into speech translation system and an SMS (Short Message Service) into speech translation system. The first tool is made up of three modules: an advanced visual interface (where a deaf person can specify a sequence of signs), a language translator (for generating the sequence of words in Spanish), and finally, an emotional text to speech (TTS) converter to generate spoken Spanish. The visual interface allows a sign sequence to be defined using several utilities. The emotional TTS converter is based on Hidden Semi-Markov Models (HSMMs) permitting voice gender, type of emotion, and emotional strength to be controlled. The second tool is made up of an SMS message editor, a language translator and the same emotional text to speech converter. Both translation tools use a phrase-based translation strategy where translation and target language models are trained from parallel corpora. In the experiments carried out to evaluate the translation performance, the sign language-speech translation system reported a 96.45 BLEU and the SMS-speech system a 44.36 BLEU in a specific domain: the renewal of the Identity Document and Driving License. In the evaluation of the emotional TTS, it is important to highlight the improvement in the naturalness thanks to the morpho-syntactic features, and the high flexibility provided by HSMMs when generating different emotional strengths.