Biomedical subjects

S E Levinson

Publications and source records attributed to S E Levinson.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1995

Speech technology in the year 2001.

This paper introduces the session "Technology in the Year 2001" and is the first of four papers dealing with the future of human-machine communication by voice. In looking to the future it is important to recognize both the difficulties of technological forecasting and the frailties of the technology as it exists today--frailties that are manifestations of our limited scientific understanding of human cognition. The technology to realize truly advanced applications does not yet exist and cannot be supported by our presently incomplete science of speech. To achieve this long-term goal, the authors advocate a fundamental research program using a cybernetic approach substantially different from more conventional synthetic approaches. In a cybernetic approach, feedback control systems will allow a machine to adapt to a linguistically rich environment using reinforcement learning.

Computers↗

PubMed1995

Speech recognition technology: a critique.

This paper introduces the session on advanced speech recognition technology. The two papers comprising this session argue that current technology yields a performance that is only an order of magnitude in error rate away from human performance and that incremental improvements will bring us to that desired level. I argue that, to the contrary, present performance is far removed from human performance and a revolution in our thinking is required to achieve the goal. It is further asserted that to bring about the revolution more effort should be expended on basic research and less on trying to prematurely commercialize a deficient technology.

Communication↗

PubMed1983

Adaptive computation of articulatory parameters from the speech signal.

An unconstrained optimization technique is used to find the values of parameters, of a combination of an articulatory and a vocal tract model, that minimize the difference between model spectra and natural speech spectra. The articulatory model is anatomically realistic and the vocal tract model is a "lossy" Webster equation for which a method of solution is given. For English vowels in the steady state, anatomically reasonable articulatory configurations whose corresponding spectra match those of human speech to within 2 dB have been computed in fewer than ten iterations. Results are also given which demonstrate a limited ability of the system to track the articulatory dynamics of voiced speech.

Body Temperature Regulation↗