18.2951, Diss: Comp Ling: Turk: 'Cross-Lingual Voice Conversion'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-18-2951. Wed Oct 10 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 18.2951, Diss: Comp Ling: Turk: 'Cross-Lingual Voice Conversion'

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1)
Date: 10-Oct-2007
From: Oytun Turk < oytunturk at gmail.com >
Subject: Cross-Lingual Voice Conversion

 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2007 12:10:52
From: Oytun Turk [oytunturk at gmail.com]
Subject: Cross-Lingual Voice Conversion
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Institution: Bo?aziçi University 
Program: Electrical and Electronics Engineering 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2007 

Author: Oytun Turk

Dissertation Title: Cross-Lingual Voice Conversion 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics


Dissertation Director(s):
Prof. Dr. Levent Mustafa Arslan

Dissertation Abstract:

Cross-lingual voice conversion refers to the automatic transformation of a
source speaker's voice to a target speaker's voice in a language that the
target speaker cannot speak. It involves a set of statistical analysis,
pattern recognition, machine learning, and signal processing techniques.
This study focuses on the problems related to cross-lingual voice
conversion by discussing open research questions, presenting new methods,
and performing comparisons with the state-of-the-art techniques. In the
training stage, a Phonetic Hidden Markov Model based automatic segmentation
and alignment method is developed for cross-lingual applications which
support text-independent and text-dependent modes. Vocal tract
transformation function is estimated using weighted speech frame mapping in
more detail. Adjusting the weights, similarity to target voice and output
quality can be balanced depending on the requirements of the cross-lingual
voice conversion application. A context-matching algorithm is developed to
reduce the one-to-many mapping problems and enable non-parallel training.
Another set of improvements are proposed for prosody transformation
including stylistic modeling and transformation of pitch and the speaking
rate. A high quality cross-lingual voice conversion database is designed
for the evaluation of the proposed methods. The database consists of
recordings from bilingual speakers of American English and Turkish. It is
employed in objective and subjective evaluations, and in case studies for
testing new ideas in cross-lingual voice conversion. 





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LINGUIST List: Vol-18-2951