Development of a Māori database for speech perception and generation

Māori speech data collection and analysis is an ongoing process, as new and existing data sets are continuously accessed for many different experimental speech perception and generation processing tasks. A data management system is an important tool to facilitate the systematic techniques applied to the speech and language data. Identification of the core components for Māori speech and language databases, translation systems, speech recognition and speech synthesis have been undertaken as research themes. The latter component will be the main area of discussion here. So to hasten the development of Māori speech synthesis, joint collaborative research with established international projects has begun. This will allow the Māori language to be presented to the wider scientific community well in advance of other similar languages, many times it's own size and distribution. Propagation of the Māori language via the information communication technology (ICT) medium is advantageous to it's long term survival.Unpublished[1] Benton, R. A. (1990) The History and Development of the Mäori Language, Dirty Silence Aspects of Language and Literature in New Zealand, Essays arising from the University of Waikato Winter Lecture Series of 1990, Oxford University Press, Auckland. [2] Harlow, R. (1990) A Name and Word Index to Ngä Mahi a Ngä Tüpuna, University of Otago Press, Dunedin. [3] Bauer, W., Parker, W., Evans, T. (1993) Maori Descriptive Grammars, Routledge, London and New York. [4] Ryan, P. M. (1997) The Reed Dictionary of Modern Mäori, Reed Publishing (NZ) Ltd. [5] Laws, M. (1998) A Bilingual Speech Interface for New Zealand English to Mäori. Unpublished M.Sc. thesis, University of Otago. [6] Dutoit, T., V, Pagel., N, Pierret., F, Bataille., O, Van Der Vrecken. (1996) “The MBROLA Project: Towards a Set of High-Quality Speech Synthesisers Free of Use for Non-Commercial Purposes”. Proc ICSLP’96, Philadelphia, Vol. 3, pp. 1393-1396. [7] Campbell, N. (1998) Multi-Lingual Concatenative Speech Synthesis. The 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour. [8] Black, A. and Taylor, P. (1997). Festival Speech Synthesis System: system documentation. Technical Report HCRC/TR-83, Human Communication Research Centre. University of Edinburgh, Scotland. [9] Dirksen, A. and Menert, L. (1998). Diphone Studio Manual. Fluency Speech Technology, Berkelstraat 137, Utrecht, Netherlands. [10] Malfrére, F. and Dutoit, T. (1997) Speech Synthesis for Text-to-Speech Alignment and Prosodic Feature Extraction. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, pp. 2637-2640. [11] Kasabov, N. (1998) Evolving fuzzy neural networks: Theory and applications for on-line adaptive prediction, decision making and control. Australian Journal of Intelligent Information Processing Systems, vol. 5 (3), pp 154-160