Meeting on Sámi Synthetic speech

• Time: 080822
• Participants: Patrik Bye, Trond Trosterud, Martti Vainio

Presentation, background

Who are we and what do we do:

• hki
• divvun
• giellatekno
• patrik + intonation

Patrik

• segmental phon, noticed that no work on Sámi intonation done.
• 3-4 yrs project (meeting in September)
• Kickoff on basic empirical work in May
• Get hold of radio material, pedagogical tapes just to see what intonational phenomena we have

• use the first year of the project for such things

• Two paid positions: Patrik + a phD.
• Applied to NFR to maybe get a third position as well.
• Autosegmental, metrical phonology, ToBi for Sámi
• Primarily North, also Lule and perhaps South.

Martti

• Done work on Finnish, Sámi would probably be closer to Finnsih
• ToBi for Finnish? Martti: Not very fruitful for Finnish, we do not have those types of intonational structures.
• We have one type of accent
• Important: Detaching form from function.
• Synthesis framework: Statistical intonation model.
• We leave it to the system to determine the contours.
• The system should learn the functions.

Collaborating?

• Patrik from Martti’s synthesis?
• Martti from Patrik’s phon analysis?

We would probably get information from each other, but we are primarily interested in your raw data (for synthesis).

Technically: Hki needs a good signal: Recordings under laboratory conditions. We have been using “the red books” (audio books for the blind)

We have rule-based accentuation: The words are marked up according to their prominence

• 0 - copulas, function words
• 1 - verbs
• 2 - nouns, adjectives
• 3 - emphasis, like in narrow focus

No question intonation in Finnish.

• what about focus-triggering clitics? – yes, utilized
• do you base yourself upon a syntactic analysis?) – yes
• In addition, there is an analysis of the information structure (given - new)

Trond

We have the syntactic analysis + a forthcoming dependency analysis

• xerox two-level morphology + lexc
• vislcg3 disambiguation and dependency

"<Mu>"
	"mun" Pron Pers Sg1 Gen @>P #1->2 
"<birra>"
	"birra" Po @ADVL #2->0   <========== #2->(5/4)
"<son>"
	"son" Pron Pers Sg3 Nom @SUBJ> #3->4 
"<lea>"
	"leat" <aux> V IV Ind Prs Sg3 @FS-STA #4->0 
"<hupman>"
	"hupmat" <mv> V TV PrfPrc @ICL-AUX< #5->4 
"<.>"
	"." CLB #6->0 

"<Munge>"
	"mun" Pron Pers Sg1 Nom Foc/ge @SUBJ> #1->2 
"<lean>"
	"leat" <aux> V IV Ind Prs Sg1 @FS-STA #2->0 
"<boahtán>"
	"boahtit" <mv> V IV PrfPrc @ICL-AUX< #3->2 
"<.>"
	"." CLB #4->0 

Material

Radio news would be good, and studio programs.

Documents and background info

• Former application on tts project (Trond/Martti/Antti)
• Application/description of intonation project (Patrik)
• Report on Sámi tts to the Sámi Parliament (Sjur Moshagen 2003)
• Governmental whitepaper 2008 requiring Sámi tts (paragraph “Talesyntese” here): [http://www.regjeringen.no/nn/dep/kkd/Dokument/Proposisjonar-og-meldingar/Stortingsmeldingar/2007-2008/stmeld-nr-35-2007-2008-/10/2/3.html?id=520174]

Forthcoming milestones

Meeting between Divvun and the Sámi parliament in october

Upcoming deadlines?

Work planning, division of labour

Autumn 08:

• Exchange papers and background documents.
• Look for upcoming grant proposal deadlines
  • Norway…
  • Finland.. Martti to have a look
• Would it be possible to make a Sámi-as-Finnish before october? Let us try:
  • identify the Finnish text input format (Martti)
  • make the same for Sámi (Patrik, Trond)
    • syllabify the Sámi text
    • turn the result into “Finnish orthography”
  • Feed the result to the finnish tts and lean back.

Spring 09 and onwards:

• Discuss formats for and evt. exchange empirical material

Resources

Needed

TODO:

• not a diphone system, but an hmm-based system.
• One man-year for Sámi segmental tts. ==> suggest 3 years (which includes
• getting to know the system and making the usual mistakes and false starts)

Find out how much to make tts

Available

• Martti: Finnish Academy researcher
• Antti: Funding for him until next summer
• Some grant proposals: …
• Evt. hiring new persons for working on Sámi.

Q: Is it possible to integrate with standard OS’s (Win/Mac) and common end-user applications (dyslectic, proofreading, screenreaders, etc.)?

The answer is yes. Web-based is easy. Integrating in mobile phones or text processors is a different thing but it is possible (done by commercal companies, like e.g. Bitlips).

Next meeting

Within a month.

Before that: the SPE rules and the Finnish example.