14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

A Latent Variable Modelling Approach to the Acoustic-to-Articulatory Mapping Problem

Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán, Steve Renals

Dept. of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK

We present a latent variable approach to the acoustic-toarticulatory mapping problem, where different vocal tract configurations can give rise to the same acoustics. In latent variable modelling, the combined acoustic and articulatory data are assumed to have been generated by an underlying low-dimensional process. A parametric probabilistic model is estimated and mappings are derived from the respective conditional distributions. This has the advantage over other methods, such as articulatory codebooks or neural networks, of directly addressing the nonuniqueness problem. We demonstrate our approach with electropalatographic and acoustic data from the ACCOR database.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Carreira-Perpiñán, Miguel Á. / Renals, Steve (1999): "A latent variable modelling approach to the acoustic-to-articulatory mapping problem", In ICPhS-14, 2013-2016.