An introduction to recent results of Japanese research and development in the fields of speech synthesis.

4.2.2. Voice Conversion Based on Piecewise Linear Conversion Rules of Formant Frequency [Mizuno-95] -- Making Formant Frequency Conversion Rules (off-line procedures) -- Voice Conversion Algorithm (on-line procedures) -- 4.2.3. Performance Evaluation -- References -- Index

Annotation In this study, Itakura (The Hong Kong Polytechnic U.) analyzes gender dominance in conversations among Japanese speakers in both their native tongue (L1) and in English (L2). The interactions studied include institutional talk as well as everyday conversation. The author's approach draws upon Conversation Analysis, the Birmingham school of discourse analysis, and dialogical analysis to examine whether patterns of gender dominance in Japanese L2 conversation are similar to those found in L1 conversation. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

This book investigates the notion of conversational dominance in depth, and seeks to establish a systematic method of analysing it. It also offers a new insight into the role of gender and the pragmatic transfer of conversational norms in the first and second language conversations among native speakers of Japanese. Drawing upon a critical synthesis of insights from several different fields, including Conversation Analysis, the Birmingham school of discourse analysis, and dialogical analysis, the author proposes an innovative analytical framework for operationalising the concept of dominance in conversation. She then applies this framework to the empirical analysis of Japanese speakers’ L1 and L2 conversations, finding direct evidence for the important role of gender and pragmatic transfer in conversational dominance. By integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches to discourse analysis, the author offers a new perspective into the pragmatic transfer of conversational norms. She does so by demonstrating how the notion of self-oriented and other-oriented conversational styles and strategies can affect the level of transfer of interactional behaviour differently for male and female speakers.

Automatic Speech Translation introduces recent results of Japanese research and development in speech translation and speech recognition. Topics covered include: fundamental concepts of speech recognition; speech pattern representation; phoneme-based HMM phoneme recognition; continuous speech recognition; speaker adaptation; speaker-independent speech recognition; utterance analysis, utterance transfer, utterance generation; contextual processing; speech synthesis and an experimental system of speech translation. This book presents the complicated technological aspects of machine translation and speech recognition, and outlines the future directions of this rapidly developing area of technology.