Human Language Technologies for Under-Resourced African Languages - Design, Challenges, and Prospects

This book provides an overview of a recent and flexible approach to speech synthesis design to develop the first statistical parametric speech synthesizer for Ibibio, a West African tonal language. The design precludes the inflexibility encountered when modeling tonal features of the language and can be used for other tonal African languages.  Mobile use and technological innovations in developing African nations have exploded. With mobile technology, many of the barriers caused by infrastructure issues have vanished. In order to address issues that are unique to African tonal languages, the book uses Ibibio as a model.  The text reviews the language's speech characteristics, required for building the front end components of the design and propose a finite state transducer (FST), useful for modelling the language's tonetactics. The statistical parametric approach discussed in the text, implements the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) technique, with the goal of creating a generic structure that learns the model from the text itself, and uses the data-driven approach to input specification.

Moses Effiong Ekpenyong is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and current Deputy Director of the Centre for Research and Development (CERAD), University of Uyo. He has been involved in research projects and has published widely in his area of specialty: Speech and Wireless Communications Technology, with over 100 research publications to his credit. He is a beneficiary of several awards/scholarships and research funding from notable organizations/institutions, such as FGN/Science and Technology Education Post-Basic (STEP-B)-World Bank; Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Nigeria; and Outside Echo, UK. He is a reviewer to national and international journals, and belongs to a number of professional bodies, including, Nigeria Computer Society (NCS), Nigerian Mathematical Society (NMS), Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), International Speech Communications Association (ISCA), and West African Linguistics Society (WALS).