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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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In this paper, we discuss acoustic parameters and a classifier we developed
to distinguish between nasals and semivowels. Based on the literature
and our own acoustic studies, we use an onset/offset measure to capture
the consonantal nature of nasals, and an energy ratio, a low spectral
peak measure and a formant density measure to capture the nasal murmur.
These acoustic parameters are combined using Support Vector Machine
based classifiers. Classification accuracies of 88.6%, 94.9% and 85.0%
were obtained for prevocalic, postvocalic and intervocalic sonorant
consonants, respectively. The overall classification rate was 92.4%
for nasals and 88.1% for semivowels. These results have been obtained
for the TIMIT database, which was collected from a large number of
speakers and contains substantial coarticulatory effects.
Bibliographic reference. Pruthi, Tarun / Espy-Wilson, Carol Y. (2003): "Automatic classification of nasals and semivowels", In ICPhS-15, 3061-3064.