Jianhua Tao – författare

Affective information processing assigns computers the human-like capabilities of observation, interpretation and generation of affect features. It is an important topic for harmonious human-computer interaction, by increasing the quality of human-computer communication and improving the intelligence of the computer.

Discussing state of art of the research in affective information processing, this book summarises key technologies researched, such as facial expression recognition, face animation, emotional speech synthesis, intelligent agent, and virtual reality. The detailed discussion covers a wide range of topics including hot topics which look to challenge and improve current research work.

Written to provide an opportunity for scientists, engineers and graduate students to learn problems, solutions and technologies in the topic area, this book will provide insight and prove a valuable reference tool.

The volume addresses issues concerning prosody generation in speech synthesis, including prosody modeling, how we can convey para- and non-linguistic information in speech synthesis, and prosody control in speech synthesis (including prosody conversions). A high level of quality has already been achieved in speech synthesis by using selection-based methods with segments of human speech. Although the method enables synthetic speech with various voice qualities and speaking styles, it requires large speech corpora with targeted quality and style.

Accordingly, speech conversion techniques are now of growing interest among researchers. HMM/GMM-based methods are widely used, but entail several major problems when viewed from the prosody perspective; prosodic features cover a wider time span than segmental features and their frame-by-frame processing is not always appropriate. The book offers a good overview of state-of-the-art studies on prosody in speech synthesis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th National Conference on Man-Machine Speech Communication, NCMMSC 2017, held in Lianyungang, China, in October 2017. 

The 13 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions. The papers address issues such as challenging issues in speech recognition and enhancement, speaker and language recognition, speech synthesis, corpus and phonetic in speech technology, speech generation, speech analyzing and modelling, speech processing of ethnic minorities, speech emotion recognition and audio signal processing.