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A TUTORIAL ON FORMANT-BASED SPEECH SYNTHESIS FOR THE DOCUMENTATION OF CRITICALLY ENDANGERED LANGUAGES
Get PDFSmaller languages, that is, those spoken by 5,000 people or less are dying at an alarming rate (Krauss 1992). Many are disappearing without having been studied acoustically. The methodology discussed in this paper can help build formant-based speech synthesis systems for the documentation and revitalization of these languages. Developing Text-to-Speech (TTS) functionalities for use in smart devices can breathe a new life into dying languages (Crystal 2000). In the first tutorial on this topic, Koffi (2020) explained how the Arpabet transcription system can be expanded for use in African languages and beyond. In the present tutorial, Author 1 and Author 2 lay the foundations for formant-based speech synthesis patterned after Klatt (1980) and Klatt and Klatt (1990). Betine, (ISO: 639-3-eot), a critically endangered language in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa, is used to illustrate the processes involved in building a speech synthesis from the ground up for moribund languages. The steps include constructing a language model, a speaker model, a software model, an intonation model, extracting relevant acoustic phonetic data, and coding them. Ancillary topics such as text normalization, downsampling, and bandwidth calculations are also discussed
DO ACOUSTIC PHONETIC CORRELATES VARY IN RELATION TO GRAMMATICAL FUNCTIONS? EXEMPLIFICATION WITH Her
Get PDFDo speakers produce the same word differently if its grammatical function changes? The word is used to provide some answers. This word is optimal because it is one of a few English words whose orthography and pronunciation remain the same across three grammatical functions. is spelled and pronounced the same when it functions as a direct object, an indirect object, or a possessive adjective. This makes it ideal for investigating any putative correlation between grammatical functions and acoustic phonetic correlates. Twenty (10 females and 10 males) speakers of American English from 10 different states recorded themselves reading the Speech Accent Archive (SAA) elicitation paragraph in which occurs four times surrounded by 31 different words. We extracted F0/pitch, F1, F2, F3, F4, intensity, and duration correlates from and the surrounding words, for a total of 4,340 measured tokens. For this paper, we focus exclusively on F0/pitch, intensity, and duration to test the existence of a putative correlation. Arithmetic means, standard deviations, and interspeaker variability analyses are provided to answer the research question. The findings help to posit the existence of the proximity and the declination principles, as a way of accounting for why correlations exist in some cases but not in others
Toward Metaliteracy and Transliteracy in the History Classroom: A Case Study Among Underserved Students
Get PDFIn the last twenty years, scholars have reimagined information literacy to better address an overly saturated world of information and the growing participatory culture of Web 2.0. Outside of library and information science (LIS), researchers have promoted transliteracy—the intersection between information, visual, digital, and other literacies—to help students find and assess information. Within the LIS discipline, metaliteracy has provided a foundation to rethink information literacy frameworks, redefining students as creators who produce and share information. Relatively few studies exist, however, on how to leverage literacies in support of student digital scholarship projects. Likewise, digital humanities professors promote metaliteracy in the classroom, yet fewer scholars create digital humanities projects or write case studies about them outside of research institutions, prestigious private colleges, and larger, well-established public history programs. This case study examines a class project for a small undergraduate Introduction to Public History course at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi (TAMU–CC), a regional university with a comparatively large population of historically underserved students. Working with one archivist, two librarians, and the professor, students established a digital home for the ongoing South Texas Stories oral history project. Through this project, students learned and practiced various aspects of primary source literacy, information literacy, visual literacy, and digital literacy. The authors argue that such digital projects promote both metaliteracy and transliteracy, offering students a holistic learning experience during which they can practice their skills and that these types of projects are feasible at all kinds of institutions, even those with largely historically underserved populations
Excerpts from These Forevers: Hiding, Dancing, Sinking, Running, Sleeping
Get PDFFive creative nonfiction, prose/personal essay excerpts from a longer story in progress called These Forevers. These excerpts are abbreviated pieces from personal experience with trauma and codependency, about growing up in an emotionally ill family and how the effects of psychological warfare have affected me. These Forevers, as a whole, is ultimately about hope, freedom, redemption, finding a way out after being lost for so long, after being deeply obsessed with and attached to my mother, attached through trauma, and born into trauma. It\u27s about her sacrifices, her light, and also the dark sadness that she herself could never ultimately recover from. She died in February of 2020. People are not defined by the past but created from it. How can we truly know ourselves if we do not know our scars? How else can we know what we are capable of surviving? Along the way, we forgive ourselves, let ourselves breathe and give ourselves time to heal. We forgive because we know everything comes from the need to love and to be loved. It takes courage to love without fear and pain. It takes courage to decide to live, despite fear and pain
Synthesis of a Novel RAS Farnesyl Protein Transferase Inhibitor
Get PDFMutant RAS proteins are associated with 30% of all human cancers. Unregulated cell growth caused by mutant RAS proteins can be prevented by RAS farnesyl protein transferase (FPTase) inhibitors. A novel FPTase inhibitor has been synthesized incorporating a modified farnesyl “tail” and a customized diphosphate “head”. It is anticipated that the modified “tail”, incorporating a phenyl substituent, will bind more tightly to FPTase due to nonbonding interactions between the aromatic ring and ten aromatic amino acid residues that line the enzyme active site. The altered polar “head”, designed from L-aspartic acid, has already been shown to mimic the natural substrate’s diphosphate moiety. It is anticipated that the bioactivity of the novel compound presented in this research will illustrate the relevance of modifications to the farnesyl “tail” in the design of farnesyl diphosphate mimetics
Metalinguistic Knowledge of Lexical Categories in Bilingual Students in Higher Education
Get PDFThe aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which bilingual, Asian American students at the college level in Central Minnesota have of metalinguistic knowledge in the lexical categories described as Academic Word List (AWL), Technical Vocabulary (TV) and General Word List (GWL). In addition, this study intends to understand the relationship between AWL, TV and GWL in these students. Although the focus of this study is AWL and TV, GWL is also discussed and investigated in this study simply due to its role with AWL and TV.
The participants are twenty Hmong American students who live in the Twin Cities and St Cloud Area and speak both Hmong and English, among other languages such as Spanish and French. They were not asked to identify their age or gender. Each participant was given a set of texts and asked to identify all words which they believed were AWL and TV. Their data was then compared to an analyzed copy of the texts; the texts were analyzed using Compleat Lexical Tutor’s Vocabprofile. The findings of this study show that the participants were able to identify on average only a quarter of all AWL and half of all TV
TAXONOMY OF SECURITY AND PRIVACY ISSUES IN SERVERLESS COMPUTING
Get PDFThe advent of cloud computing has led to a new era of computer usage. Networking and physical security are some of the IT infrastructure concerns that IT administrators around the world had to worry about for their individual environments. Cloud computing took away that burden and redefined the meaning of IT administrators. Serverless computing as it relates to secure software development is creating the same kind of change. Developers can quickly spin up a secure development environment in a matter of minutes without having to worry about any of the underlying infrastructure setups. In the paper, we will look at the merits and demerits of serverless computing, what is drawing the demand for serverless computing among developers, the security and privacy issues of serverless technology, and detail the parameters to consider when setting up and using a secure development environment based on serverless computin
The Effects of School Selectivity on Student Loan Default Rates
Get PDFThe student debt crisis is one of the most prominent financial problems facing the United States today. As of 2018, the student loan market is now the largest source of non-mortgage household debt in the United States. Using data from 4-year public universities in the United States from 2013 to 2018, I examine the relationship between school selectivity and student loan default rates. I employ an OLS model with measures of selectivity defined as ACT scores of incoming freshmen and admission percentages of universities. Where higher ACT scores and lower admission percentages signify an increase in school selectivity, I find a negative relationship with ACT scores and default rates. These results are robust across model specifications and imply that higher ACT scores lead to a decrease in the chance of loan default. I suggest education policy changes, such as a personal finance seminar for incoming freshmen at low-selectivity schools, could lead to decreases in default rates
Extractive Text Summarization Using Machine Learning
Get PDFWe routinely encounter too much information in the form of social media posts, blogs, news articles, research papers, and other formats. This represents an infeasible quantity of information to process, even for selecting a more manageable subset. The process of condensing a large amount of text data into a shorter form that still conveys the important ideas of the original document is text summarization. Text summarization is an active subfield of natural language processing. Extractive text summarization identifies and concatenates important sections of a document sections to form a shorter document that summarizes the contents of the original document. We discuss, implement, and compare several unsupervised machine learning algorithms including latent semantic analysis, latent dirichlet allocation, and k-means clustering. ROUGE-N metric was used to evaluate summaries generated by these machine learning algorithms. Summaries generated by using tf-idf as a feature extraction scheme and latent semantic analysis had the highest ROUGE-N scores. This computer-level assessment was validated using an empirical analysis survey
What Attributes do Educators Use to Assign Early Childhood Special Education Students to a Federal Classroom Setting (Inclusion vs. Non-inclusion
Get PDFInclusion and non-inclusion are two very common models used in the early childhood education
profession. Given the two models, it is unclear currently how to decide what setting would best
benefit a student. Is non-inclusion a better option for a student with social-emotional deficits?
Or perhaps they would better benefit from typical peer models in an inclusive setting. The
following research was designed to survey early childhood educators and ask what
qualifications, strengths, and deficits would lead them to place a student in an inclusive early
childhood classroom. With a small number of respondents, data showed that many educators
seemed to have no preference as to what developmental area the strengths or deficits
emerged. Further, educators seemed to be unclear as to what skill levels would determine a
non-inclusive or inclusive preschool placement