Kind Of Annotation Research Articles

Domain-specific prominence-based concatenation

Some recent approaches to unlimited text-to-speech conversion do not use ‘‘designed’’ inventories of concatenative units like diphones. Instead, an annotated corpus of read speech is searched for the realization of a speech segment whose features best match the corresponding ones demanded by the synthesis input. Crucial for this approach are the size and the variety of the corpus, the number and kind of annotations, and the definition of ‘‘best match’’ based on these annotations. In this implementation, the parameter ‘‘perceived prominence’’ is relied on as the most important parameter for the selection of a prosodically appropriate realization. A previous investigation with a German corpus indicated, however, that a corpus has to be very large in order to allow prosodic variations (e.g., different focus placements) of one utterance while retaining an acceptable intelligibility, if no post-selection signal modification is applied. The application of the same procedure to an American English corpus with domain-specific utterances (travel planning) indicates that the restriction to specific domains yields better results, but that signal manipulation is inevitable in order to obtain intelligible speech.

ANNA

A NNA is a proposal to extend Ada to include facilities for formally specifying the intended behaviour of Ada programs (or portions thereof) at all stages of program development. A NNA programs are Ada programs with formal comments. Formal comments in A NNA consist of virtual Ada text and annotations. The syntax and semantics of different kinds of annotations are defined: declarative annotations (for variables, subtypes, subprograms, and packages), statement annotations, exception annotations, and visibility annotations. A NNA includes a small number of predefined attributes which may appear only in annotations, e.g., access type collections.The lexical structure of A NNA is designed so that the extensions of Ada appear as Ada comments. A NNA programs are therefore acceptable by Ada translators. The semantics of annotations are defined in terms of Ada concepts, in particular many annotations are generalization of the constraint concept. It is therefore a simple step for the Ada programmer to use A NNA to give formal specifications of programs.A NNA is intended to provide a formal framework within which different theories of formal specification may be applied to Ada. Our proposal omits tasking for the time being.

Bibliography of Cross-Cultural Studies: Supplement I

The first supplement to O'Leary's 1969 bibliography of cross-cultural studies is presented. Naroll's classification of types of hologeistic studies is followed, and the number of kinds of annotation is increased.