Ms.Yawen XUE, a 1st year doctral student in Akagi lab. of Human Life Design Area, received Best Poster Presentation Award in The RIEC International Symposium on Ultra Realistic Interactive Acoustic Communications 2016 (ISURAC 2016).


Reference: http://www.foresight.riec.tohoku.ac.jp/isymp.html


■Date Awarded
May 21, 2016

■Title
A method for synthesizing emotional speech using the three-layered model based on a dimensional approach

■Article
This paper proposes an emotional speech synthesis system based on a three-layered model using a dimensional approach. Most previous studies related to emotional speech synthesis using the dimensional approach focused on the relationship between acoustic features and emotion dimensions (valence and activation) only. However, people do not perceive emotion directly from acoustic features. Hence, the acoustic features have being particularly difficult to predict, and the affectiveness of the synthesized sound is far from that intended. The ultimate goal of this research is to improve the accuracy of acoustic feature estimation and modification rules in order to synthesize affective speech more similar to that intended in the dimensional emotion space. The proposed system is composed by three layers: acoustic features, semantic primitives, and emotion dimensions. Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) is used to connect the three layers. The related acoustic features of each semantic primitive are selected for synthesizing the emotional speech. On the basis of morphing rules, the estimated acoustic features can be applied to synthesize emotional speech. Listening tests were carried out to verify whether the synthesized speech can give the intended impression in the dimensional emotion space. Results show that not only is the accuracy of estimated acoustic features raised but also the modification rules work well for the synthesized speech, resulting in the proposed method improving the quality of synthesized speech.

■Comment
I am Yawen Xue, a first-year doctor student in Masato Akagi laboratory. It is my honor to get the Best Poster Presentation Award in the RIEC International Symposium on Ultra Realistic Interactive Acoustic Communications. I would like to greatly appreciate my professor, Masato Akagi. It is him who opens the window of the acoustic field and guides me to challenge more and more interesting topic in this field. And I also want to express my thankfulness to my family and friends, without the support from them, I would never concentrate all my spirit on study. Of course, I would like to express my gratitude to JAIST which is completely ideal institute for studying and researching. Research is a long story. This award is not only the affirmation for my previous but also a promotion for the next. I will try to work harder to obtain further results in the coming studies.

July 20,2016