Speech Analysis and Synthesis of the Punjabi Language

Abstract

The present thesis entitled “Speech Analysis and Synthesis of the Punjabi Language” embodies the investigations carried out by Dr. Surinderpal Singh Dhanjal at the School of Mathematics and Computer Applications (SMCA), under the supervision of Dr. Satvinder Singh Bhatia (Professor, SMCA, Thapar University, Patiala). The first issue is the actual representation of the phonemes. In linguistics, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) designed by the International Phonetic Association is used to represent the phonemes. However, the major limitation of this representation is that it needs some special symbols that are not readily available on computer keyboards. In this work, a new phonetic alphabet consistent with the ARPAbet phonetic transcription of the Punjabi language has been developed. This newly designed scheme called PUNJARPAbet has also been graphically presented in this thesis. The second issue is to develop a new corpus suitable for achieving the third objective. A new text and speech corpus with several original features has been developed. The contents of this chapter meet the second objective set for this research. The new corpus has at least twenty original features such as complete sentences (rather than words only), some lines of the folk songs in the original form and the modified form, some single line folk songs (bolis), some newly-written bolis, some slowly fading words of the Punjabi language, and some ṭheṭh pendu shabads (rustic words). In the corpus developed in this work, the speech sentences have been recorded in the Malwai dialect of the Punjabi language, and the sentences have been written in the Gurmukhi script. The fact that the new corpus is very rich and versatile due to a wide variety of its linguistic and cultural features makes it an ideal corpus for any serious speech processing work in the Punjabi language. The third issue is to analyze and synthesize the Punjabi speech. No work has so far been reported in the literature where the Punjabi speech has been analyzed/synthesized using the Linear Predictive Coding (LPC). This work investigated the linear prediction analysis and synthesis of the Punjabi speech for the first time. The linear prediction technique is rated very high in the broad field of speech processing. This technique has been chosen because of its popularity, sound mathematical properties, simplicity, and its effectiveness as evidenced by the SPEECH UNDERSTANDING RESEARCH (SUR) project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) started in early 1970s.