Chinese speech synthesis is the application of speech synthesis to the Chinese language (usually Standard Chinese). It poses additional difficulties due to Chinese characters frequently having different pronunciations in different contexts and the complex prosody, which is essential to convey the meaning of words, and sometimes the difficulty in obtaining agreement among native speakers concerning what the correct pronunciation is of certain phonemes. == Concatenation (Ekho and KeyTip) == Recordings can be concatenated in any desired combination, but the joins sound forced (as is usual for simple concatenation-based speech synthesis) and this can severely affect prosody; these synthesizers are also inflexible in terms of speed and expression. However, because these synthesizers do not rely on a corpus, there is no noticeable degradation in performance when they are given more unusual or awkward phrases. Ekho is an open source TTS which simply concatenates sampled syllables. It currently supports Cantonese, Mandarin, and experimentally Korean. Some of the Mandarin syllables have been pitched-normalised in Praat. A modified version of these is used in Gradint's "synthesis from partials". cjkware.com used to ship a product called KeyTip Putonghua Reader which worked similarly; it contained 120 Megabytes of sound recordings (GSM-compressed to 40 Megabytes in the evaluation version), comprising 10,000 multi-syllable dictionary words plus single-syllable recordings in 6 different prosodies (4 tones, neutral tone, and an extra third-tone recording for use at the end of a phrase). == Lightweight synthesizers (eSpeak and Yuet) == The lightweight open-source speech project eSpeak, which has its own approach to synthesis, has experimented with Mandarin and Cantonese. eSpeak was used by Google Translate from May 2010 until December 2010. The commercial product "Yuet" is also lightweight (it is intended to be suitable for resource-constrained environments like embedded systems); it was written from scratch in ANSI C starting from 2013. Yuet claims a built-in NLP model that does not require a separate dictionary; the speech synthesised by the engine claims clear word boundaries and emphasis on appropriate words. Communication with its author is required to obtain a copy. Both eSpeak and Yuet can synthesis speech for Cantonese and Mandarin from the same input text, and can output the corresponding romanisation (for Cantonese, Yuet uses Yale and eSpeak uses Jyutping; both use Pinyin for Mandarin). eSpeak does not concern itself with word boundaries when these don't change the question of which syllable should be spoken. == Corpus-based == A "corpus-based" approach can sound very natural in most cases but can err in dealing with unusual phrases if they can't be matched with the corpus. The synthesiser engine is typically very large (hundreds or even thousands of megabytes) due to the size of the corpus. === iFlyTek === Anhui USTC iFlyTek Co., Ltd (iFlyTek) published a W3C paper in which they adapted Speech Synthesis Markup Language to produce a mark-up language called Chinese Speech Synthesis Markup Language (CSSML) which can include additional markup to clarify the pronunciation of characters and to add some prosody information. The amount of data involved is not disclosed by iFlyTek but can be seen from the commercial products that iFlyTek have licensed their technology to; for example, Bider's SpeechPlus is a 1.3 Gigabyte download, 1.2 Gigabytes of which is used for the highly compressed data for a single Chinese voice. iFlyTek's synthesiser can also synthesise mixed Chinese and English text with the same voice (e.g. Chinese sentences containing some English words); they claim their English synthesis to be "average". The iFlyTek corpus appears to be heavily dependent on Chinese characters, and it is not possible to synthesize from pinyin alone. It is sometimes possible by means of CSSML to add pinyin to the characters to disambiguate between multiple possible pronunciations, but this does not always work. === NeoSpeech === There is an online interactive demonstration for NeoSpeech speech synthesis, which accepts Chinese characters and also pinyin if it's enclosed in their proprietary "VTML" markup. === Mac OS === Mac OS had Chinese speech synthesizers available up to version 9. This was removed in 10.0 and reinstated in 10.7 (Lion). === Historical corpus-based synthesizers (no longer available) === A corpus-based approach was taken by Tsinghua University in SinoSonic, with the Harbin dialect voice data taking 800 Megabytes. This was planned to be offered as a download but the link was never activated. Nowadays, only references to it can be found on Internet Archive. Bell Labs' approach, which was demonstrated online in 1997 but subsequently removed, was described in a monograph "Multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis: The Bell Labs Approach" (Springer, October 31, 1997, ISBN 978-0-7923-8027-6), and the former employee who was responsible for the project, Chilin Shih (who subsequently worked at the University of Illinois) put some notes about her methods on her website.
Syman
SYMAN is an artificial intelligence technology that uses data from social media profiles to identify trends in the job market. SYMAN is designed to organize actionable data for products and services including recruiting, human capital management, CRM, and marketing. SYMAN was developed with a $21 million series B financing round secured by Identified, which was led by VantagePoint Capital Partners and Capricorn Investment Group.
BFR algorithm
The BFR algorithm, named after its inventors Bradley, Fayyad and Reina, is a variant of k-means algorithm that is designed to cluster data in a high-dimensional Euclidean space. It makes a very strong assumption about the shape of clusters: they must be normally distributed about a centroid. The mean and standard deviation for a cluster may differ for different dimensions, but the dimensions must be independent. In other words, the data must take the shape of axis-aligned ellipses.
FrameNet
FrameNet is a group of online lexical databases based upon the theory of meaning known as Frame semantics, developed by linguist Charles J. Fillmore. The project's fundamental notion is simple: most words' meanings may be best understood in terms of a semantic frame, which is a description of a certain kind of event, connection, or item and its actors. As an illustration, the act of cooking usually requires the following: a cook, the food being cooked, a container to hold the food while it is being cooked, and a heating instrument. Within FrameNet, this act is represented by a frame named Apply_heat, and its components (Cook, Food, Container, and Heating_instrument), are referred to as frame elements (FEs). The Apply_heat frame also lists a number of words that represent it, known as lexical units (LUs), like fry, bake, boil, and broil. Other frames are simpler. For example, Placing only has an agent or cause, a theme—something that is placed—and the location where it is placed. Some frames are more complex, like Revenge, which contains more FEs (offender, injury, injured party, avenger, and punishment). As in the examples of Apply_heat and Revenge below, FrameNet's role is to define the frames and annotate sentences to demonstrate how the FEs fit syntactically around the word that elicits the frame. == Concepts == === Frames === A frame is a schematic representation of a situation involving various participants, props, and other conceptual roles. Examples of frame names are Being_born and Locative_relation. A frame in FrameNet contains a textual description of what it represents (a frame definition), associated frame elements, lexical units, example sentences, and frame-to-frame relations. === Frame elements === Frame elements (FE) provide additional information to the semantic structure of a sentence. Each frame has a number of core and non-core FEs which can be thought of as semantic roles. Core FEs are essential to the meaning of the frame while non-core FEs are generally descriptive (such as time, place, manner, etc.) For example: The only core FE of the Being_born frame is called Child; non-core FEs Time, Place, Means, etc. Core FEs of the Commerce_goods-transfer frame include the Seller, Buyer, and Goods, while non-core FEs include a Place, Purpose, etc. FrameNet includes shallow data on syntactic roles that frame elements play in the example sentences. For example, for a sentence like "She was born about AD 460", FrameNet would mark She as a noun phrase referring to the Child frame element, and "about AD 460" as a noun phrase corresponding to the Time frame element. Details of how frame elements can be realized in a sentence are important because this reveals important information about the subcategorization frames as well as possible diathesis alternations (e.g. "John broke the window" vs. "The window broke") of a verb. === Lexical units === Lexical units (LUs) are lemmas, with their part of speech, that evoke a specific frame. In other words, when an LU is identified in a sentence, that specific LU can be associated with its specific frame(s). For each frame, there may be many LUs associated to that frame, and also there may be many frames that share a specific LU; this is typically the case with LUs that have multiple word senses. Alongside the frame, each lexical unit is associated with specific frame elements by means of the annotated example sentences. For example, lexical units that evoke the Complaining frame (or more specific perspectivized versions of it, to be precise), include the verbs complain, grouse, lament, and others. === Example sentences === Frames are associated with example sentences and frame elements are marked within the sentences. Thus, the sentence She was born about AD 460 is associated with the frame Being_born, while She is marked as the frame element Child and "about AD 460" is marked as Time. From the start, the FrameNet project has been committed to looking at evidence from actual language use as found in text collections like the British National Corpus. Based on such example sentences, automatic semantic role labeling tools are able to determine frames and mark frame elements in new sentences. === Valences === FrameNet also exposes statistics on the valence of each frame; that is, the number and position of the frame elements within example sentences. The sentence She was born about AD 460 falls in the valence pattern NP Ext, INI --, NP Dep which occurs twice in the FrameNet's annotation report for the born.v lexical unit, namely: She was born about AD 460, daughter and granddaughter of Roman and Byzantine emperors, whose family had been prominent in Roman politics for over 700 years. He was soon posted to north Africa, and never met their only child, a daughter born 8 June 1941. === Frame relations === FrameNet additionally captures relationships between different frames using relations. These include the following: Inheritance: When one frame is a more specific version of another, more abstract, parent frame. Anything that is true about the parent frame must also be true about the child frame, and a mapping is specified between the frame elements of the parent and the frame elements of the child. Perspectivization: A neutral frame is connected to a frame with a specific perspective of the same scenario. For example, Commerce_transfer-goods is considered from the perspective of the buyer in Commerce_buy and from that of the seller in Commerce_sell. Subframe: Some frames refer to complex scenarios that consist of several individual states or events that can be described by separate frames. For example, Criminal_process is composed of Arrest, Trial, and so on. Precedence: This relation captures the temporal order that holds between subframes of a complex frame. For example, within the Cycle_of_life_and_death frame, the subframe Death is preceded by the subframe Being_born. Causative and Inchoative: These two relations mark, for causative- and inchoative-aspect frames, the separate stative frame they refer to. For example, the stative Position_on_a_scale (e.g. "She had a high salary") is described by the causative Cause_change_of_scalar_position (e.g. "She raised his salary") and by the inchoative Change_position_on_a_scale frame (e.g. "Her salary increased"). Using: This relation marks a frame that in some way involves another frame. For example, Judgment_communication uses both Judgment and Statement, but does not inherit from either of them because there is no clear correspondence of frame elements. See also: Connects frames that bear some resemblance but need to be distinguished carefully. == Applications == FrameNet has proven to be useful in a number of computational applications, because computers need additional knowledge in order to recognize that "John sold a car to Mary" and "Mary bought a car from John" describe essentially the same situation, despite using two quite different verbs, different prepositions and a different word order. FrameNet has been used in applications like question answering, paraphrasing, recognizing textual entailment, and information extraction, either directly or by means of Semantic Role Labeling tools. The first automatic system for Semantic Role Labeling (SRL, sometimes also referred to as "shallow semantic parsing") was developed by Daniel Gildea and Daniel Jurafsky based on FrameNet in 2002. Semantic Role Labeling has since become one of the standard tasks in natural language processing, with the latest version (1.7) of FrameNet now fully supported in the Natural Language Toolkit. Since frames are essentially semantic descriptions, they are similar across languages, and several projects have arisen over the years that have relied on the original FrameNet as the basis for additional non-English FrameNets, for Spanish, Japanese, German, and Polish, among others.
The Best Free AI Background Remover for Beginners
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Amazon Q
Amazon Q is a chatbot developed by Amazon for enterprise use. Based on both Amazon Titan and GPT-5, it was announced on November 28, 2023. At launch, it was a part of the Amazon Web Services management console. Amazon CodeWhisperer is a part of Amazon Q Developer, a part of Amazon Q. == History == Amazon's business-focused chatbot Q was announced on November 28, 2023 in a preview, with a full version available at $20 per person per month. On July 19, 2025, the Amazon Q Visual Studio Code extension was compromised to delete the user's home directory. The issue was fixed on July 21. == Capabilities == Q can be prompted to summarize long documents and group chats, create charts, data analysis and write code. Q is also capable of accessing non-Amazon services. The chatbot is based on Amazon Titan and GPT-5, and uses the Amazon Bedrock repository of foundational models. It is part of the Amazon Web Services management console.
Julia Hirschberg
Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing. She received her first PhD in history from the University of Michigan and the second from the University of Pennsylvania in computer science doing research in Natural Language Processing. She worked at Bell Labs and AT&T Bell Labs from 1985 to 2002 and from 2002 at Columbia University where she is currently the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science. == Biography == Julia Linn Bell Hirschberg received her first Ph.D. degree in history (16th-century Mexico) from University of Michigan in 1976. She served on the History faculty of Smith College from 1974 to 1982. She subsequently shifted to Computer Science studies, receiving her M.S. in Computer and Information Science from University of Pennsylvania in 1982 and a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from University of Pennsylvania in 1985. Upon graduation from University of Pennsylvania in 1985, Hirschberg joined AT&T Bell Labs as a Member of Technical staff in the Linguistics Research Department, where she worked on improving prosody assignment for Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS) in the Bell Labs TTS system. She was promoted to Department Head in 1994 when she created a new Human Computer Interface Research Lab. She and her department remained at Bell Labs until 1996 when they moved to AT&T Labs Research as part of a corporate reorganization. In 2002, she joined the Columbia University faculty as a professor in the Department of Computer Science. She served as Chair of the Computer Science Department from 2012 to 2018. She still leads classes at Columbia in speech and natural language research and supervises PhD students and a large number of research project students. == Research == Hirschberg's research has included prosody, discourse structure, conversational implicature, text-to-speech synthesis, speech summarization, spoken dialogue systems, emotional speech, deceptive speech, charismatic speech, entrainment, empathetic speech and code-switching. Hirschberg was among the first to combine Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches to discourse and dialogue with speech research. She pioneered techniques in text analysis for prosody assignment in Text-to-Speech synthesis at Bell laboratories in the 1980s and 1990s, developing corpus-based statistical models based upon syntactic and discourse information which are in general use today in TTS systems. With Janet Pierrehumbert, she developed a theoretical model of intonational meaning. She was a leader in the development of the ToBI conventions for intonational description, which have been extended to numerous languages and which today are the most widely used standard for intonational annotation. Hirschberg has been a pioneer together with Gregory Ward in much experimental work on intonational sources of language meaning and how these interact with pragmatic phenomena, particularly on the meaning of accent (intonational prominent) items and the meaning of intonational contours. She also has innovated in numerous other areas involving prosody and meaning, including the role of grammatical function and surface position in pitch accent location, the use of prosody in disambiguating cue phrases (discourse markers) with Diane Litman, the role of prosody in disambiguation in English, Italian, and Spanish with Cinzia Avesani and Pilar Prieto, and the automatic identification of speech recognition errors using prosodic information, At AT&T Labs she worked with Fernando Pereira, Steve Whittaker, and others on speech search and developing new interfaces for speech navigation. At Columbia, she and her students have continued and extended research on spoken dialogue systems (automatically detecting speech recognition errors and inappropriate system queries, modeling turn-taking behavior, dialogue entrainment, modeling and generating clarification dialogues); on the automatic classification of trust, charisma, deception and emotion from speech; on speech summarization; prosody translation, hedging behavior in text and speech, text-to-speech synthesis, and speech search in low resource languages. She also holds several patents in TTS and in speech search. Corpora she and collaborators have collected include the Boston Directions Corpus, the Columbia SRI Colorado Deception Corpus, and the Columbia Games Corpus. She has served on numerous technical boards and editorial committees. She has served as a member of the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Board of Directors and as co-chair of CRA-W. She is also noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. == Awards == Hirschberg's notable honors and awards include: Elected as a member of the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence Academy of Sciences and recipient of the NAAI Artificial Intelligence Exploration Award, 2025 Elected as a Fellow of Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), 2024. 2020 ISCA Special Service Medal Honorary Doctorate (eredoctoraat) from Tilburg University, Netherlands, 2018. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018. IEEE Fellow, 2017 National Academy of Engineering, 2017 ACM Fellow in 2015 Elected member, American Philosophical Society, 2014. Honorary member, Association for Laboratory Phonology, 2014. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (Founding) Fellow, 2011. International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Medal for Scientific Achievement, 2011. IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, 2011. Honorary Doctorate (Hedersdoktorer), KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) Stockholm, Sweden, 2007. AAAI Fellow, 1994. == Publications == A social history of Puebla de Los Ángeles, 1531-60, 1976 Empirical studies on the disambiguation of cue phrases, 1991 Prosody and conversation, 1998 Most recent publications and other information, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/speech/.