Permanent Magnetic Articulograph (PMA) vs Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA) in Articulation-to-Speech Synthesis for Silent Speech Interface

Beiming Cao, Nordine Sebkhi, Ted Mau, Omer T. Inan, Jun Wang


Abstract
Silent speech interfaces (SSIs) are devices that enable speech communication when audible speech is unavailable. Articulation-to-speech (ATS) synthesis is a software design in SSI that directly converts articulatory movement information into audible speech signals. Permanent magnetic articulograph (PMA) is a wireless articulator motion tracking technology that is similar to commercial, wired Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA). PMA has shown great potential for practical SSI applications, because it is wireless. The ATS performance of PMA, however, is unknown when compared with current EMA. In this study, we compared the performance of ATS using a PMA we recently developed and a commercially available EMA (NDI Wave system). Datasets with same stimuli and size that were collected from tongue tip were used in the comparison. The experimental results indicated the performance of PMA was close to, although not as equally good as that of EMA. Furthermore, in PMA, converting the raw magnetic signals to positional signals did not significantly affect the performance of ATS, which support the future direction in PMA-based ATS can be focused on the use of positional signals to maximize the benefit of spatial analysis.
Anthology ID:
W19-1703
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Heidi Christensen, Kristy Hollingshead, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Frank Rudzicz, Keith Vertanen
Venue:
SLPAT
SIG:
SIGSLPAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
17–23
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-1703
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-1703
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Beiming Cao, Nordine Sebkhi, Ted Mau, Omer T. Inan, and Jun Wang. 2019. Permanent Magnetic Articulograph (PMA) vs Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA) in Articulation-to-Speech Synthesis for Silent Speech Interface. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies, pages 17–23, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Permanent Magnetic Articulograph (PMA) vs Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA) in Articulation-to-Speech Synthesis for Silent Speech Interface (Cao et al., SLPAT 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-1703.pdf