Using a sigmoid transformation for improved modeling of phoneme duration

  • Authors:
  • K. E. A. Silverman;J. R. Bellegarda

  • Affiliations:
  • Spoken Language Group, Apple Comput. Inc., Cupertino, CA, USA;-

  • Venue:
  • ICASSP '99 Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 01
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

The "sums-of-products" approach has emerged as one of the most promising avenues to model contextual influences on phoneme duration. The associated regression is generally applied after log-transforming the durations. This paper presents empirical and theoretical evidence which suggests that this transformation is not optimal. A promising alternative solution is proposed, based on a sigmoid function. Preliminary experimental results obtained on over 50,000 phonemes in varied prosodic contexts show that this transformation reduces the unexplained deviations in the data by more than 30%. Alternatively, for a given level of performance, it halves the number of parameters required by the model.