Table Of ContentSPEECH ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS
OF THE PUNJABI LANGUAGE
A Thesis
submitted in fulfillment of the requirement
for the award of the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
COMPUTER SCIENCE
By
DR. SURINDERPAL SINGH DHANJAL
(Registration No. 9051453)
Department of Computing Science
Thompson Rivers University, KAMLOOPS, BC, Canada
[email protected]
Supervisor:
DR. SATVINDER SINGH BHATIA
Professor, School of Mathematics & Computer Applications
Thapar University, PATIALA, Punjab, India
[email protected]
School of Mathematics & Computer Applications
Thapar University
Patiala-147004, Punjab, India
August 25, 2014
Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected]
ii
Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected]
DEDICATED TO
MY PARENTS
Late Rala Singh Dhanjal (Father) and Late Nand Kaur Dhanjal (Mother)
MY BROTHERS
Late Malkit Singh Kundan (eldest Brother) and Late Mrs. Tej Kaur Dhanjal
Late Amarjit Singh Dhanjal M.A., B.Ed. (elder Brother) and Mrs. Manjit Kaur Dhanjal
Amritpaul Singh Dhanjal M.A., LL.B. (elder Brother) and Mrs. Mandip Kaur Dhanjal
MY SISTERS
Late Amar Kaur Sond (eldest Sister) and Late Mr. Harjit Singh Sond
Late Ranjit Kaur Ghattaurha (elder Sister) and Mr. Gurcharan Singh Ghattaurha
Harbans Kaur Ghattaurha (elder Sister) and Late Mr. Bhagwan Singh Ghattaurha
Gurcharan Kaur Dhiman (younger Sister) and Mr. Ranjit Singh Dhiman
MY WIFE
Balbir Kaur Dhanjal B.Sc.N.
and
MY ONLY CHILD
Ms Samta Dhanjal B.A. (Math and Bus. Mgmt.), Post-Bac Teaching Diploma (TESL)
iii
Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected]
I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I MAY APPEAR TO THE WORLD, BUT TO MYSELF I
SEEM TO HAVE BEEN ONLY LIKE A BOY PLAYING ON THE SEA-SHORE, AND
DIVERTING MYSELF IN NOW AND THEN FINDING A SMOOTHER PEBBLE OR
A PRETTIER SHELL THAN ORDINARY, WHILST THE GREAT OCEAN OF
TRUTH LAY ALL UNDISCOVERED BEFORE ME.
- ISAAC NEWTON (1642-1727)
WHAT WE KNOW IS NOT MUCH,
WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW IS IMMENSE.
- PIERRE-SIMON LAPLACE (1749-1827)
IF WE KNEW WHAT IT WAS WE WERE DOING, IT WOULD NOT BE CALLED
RESEARCH, WOULD IT?
- ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955)
iv
Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected]
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work leading to this doctoral thesis has been carried out by me as a research
scholar at the School of Mathematics and Computer Applications (SMCA) of Thapar
University (formerly Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology), Patiala since July
2005. The time utilized to complete this project has been educational for me in the true
sense of the word.
First of all, I express my heartiest gratitude to my Supervisor Dr. Satvinder Singh
Bhatia (Professor and former Head, School of Mathematics & Computer Applications,
Thapar University, Patiala, India) for his inspiring guidance and many stimulating
discussions throughout the completion of this work. In fact, he was such a constant
source of inspiration that his real contribution to this project and my life cannot be
expressed in words.
I take this opportunity to thank Prof. Prakash Gopalan (Director, Thapar
University) for providing me University's necessary resources and facilities to carry out
this research work. I am deeply thankful to Dr. P. K. Bajpai (Dean, Research and
Sponsored Projects) and Dr. S. K. Mohapatra (Dean, Academic Affairs), Thapar
University for their support and needful help during the various stages of this research.
I express my gratitude to the Doctoral committee comprising Dr. Rajesh Kumar
(Head, SMCA) and Dr. Mahesh Kumar Sharma (Associate Professor, SMCA) for
monitoring the progress and providing valuable suggestions for improvement of this
work. I also take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to all the faculty members
and staff members in the SMCA, Thapar University, Patiala and in the Department of
Computing Science, Thompson Rivers University Kamloops, Canada (in particular Dr.
Faheem Ahmed, Ms. Mridula Sharma, Ms. Marcy Desrosiers, and Mr. Jagvinder Basran)
for discussions, suggestions, co-operation, and technical support to complete this work. I
will be missing in my duties if I do not thank Mr. Gurbinder Singh (Deputy Registrar,
Academic) for his untiring help throughout my stay in Thapar University as well as when
I was away to my work place at Thompson Rivers University Kamloops, Canada. Navjot
Josan and Priya Shahi (Research Scholars, SMCA), Digamber Singh (SMCA), Narender
Sharma, Mahender Yadav, and Surat Singh (guest house staff) at Thapar University
deserve a special mention for their kind support.
Many stimulating discussions with distinguished scientists at International
Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, India (Dr. Yegnanarayana, and
Dr. Peri Bhaskararao), the continuous encouragement from Prof. Manmandar Singh
(Punjabi University, Patiala), along with the technical support from Research Scholars
Nivedita and Ganga Mohan (IIIT, Hyderabad), Shipra Arora and Gautam Kumar (KIIT,
Gurgaon, India), Kulvinder Kular (Omni TV, Vancouver, Canada), Kirpal S. Pannu
(Toronto, Canada), and Gurmail Rai (Surrey, Canada) are gratefully acknowledged.
v
Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected]
vi
Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected]
ABSTRACT
The present thesis entitled “Speech Analysis and Synthesis of the Punjabi
Language” embodies the investigations carried out by me at the School of
Mathematics and Computer Applications (SMCA), under the supervision of Dr.
Satvinder Singh Bhatia (Professor, SMCA, Thapar University, Patiala).
The quality of the synthesized speech, also known as (aka) synthetic speech, has
been an important issue for speech researchers. This project is an attempt to address this
important issue of synthesizing high quality speech in the Punjabi language. The Punjabi
language is a modern Indo-Aryan language. The Punjabi language has been ranked
amongst the top 15 spoken languages of the world. Over the years, this ranking has
varied between 10 and 18. With more than 90 million native speakers, and more than 140
million speakers in 150 countries of the world, the Punjabi is considered amongst the
world’s 10 most influential languages, and is respectfully included in an article by the
same name, “The World’s 10 Most Influential Languages” by George Weber. Andronov
reports that the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences has
prepared and preserved dozens of reports on the Punjabi language. Any research on the
Punjabi language, therefore, assumes an international significance.
There are many dialects of the Punjabi language mainly written in the two scripts.
Punjabi University (Patiala, India) published a list of 31 dialects of the Punjabi language.
In the Punjab state of India, the Punjabi Language is written in the Gurmukhi script,
whereas in the Punjab state of Pakistan, the Punjabi language is written in the Persian (or
Shahmukhi) script. It will be an enormous task to deal with all dialects of both scripts of
the Punjabi language. This research work, therefore, concentrates only on one dialect (the
Malwai dialect) and one script (the Gurmukhi script) of the Punjabi language.
This research work has been carried out with the following three objectives in
view as set in the Institute Research Board (IRB):
(i) To design a new phonetic alphabet for speech processing in the Punjabi language
consistent with the ARPAbet because at present, the symbols consistent with the
ARPAbet phonetic transcription do not exist in the Punjabi Language.
(ii) To develop a new text and speech corpus for the Punjabi language because no
computer database/corpus exists in the Punjabi language, where the representative
speech sentences concentrate on a specific dialect (the Malwai dialect) of the
Punjabi language.
(iii) To conduct the linear prediction analysis and synthesis (aka Linear Predictive
Coding or LPC) of the Punjabi speech sentences because no work has so far been
vii
Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected]
reported in the literature where the Punjabi speech has been analyzed/synthesized
using the linear prediction model of speech production.
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 in CHAPTER II. This newly designed
scheme called PUNJARPAbet has been graphically presented in CHAPTER VI. This
achieves our first objective set for this study.
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 in CHAPTER IV. 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. The third objective set for this project has been accomplished in
CHAPTER V and graphically presented in CHAPTER VI.
The present thesis consists of seven chapters, and five appendices. The work
carried out in this thesis can be described as follows:
Chapter I is introductory and it presents the basic concepts required in this thesis.
Chapter II introduces the main concepts required to understand the broad field of
Linguistics so that one can understand the corpus designed in Chapter IV. A new
phonetic alphabet (called PUNJARPAbet) consistent with ARPAbet is designed in this
chapter. This chapter achieves objective 1 set for this research. Chapter III prepares the
viii
Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected]
reader for the linear prediction speech analysis and synthesis of the Punjabi language to
be conducted in Chapter V. In Chapter IV, a new text and speech corpus has been
designed. It covers objective 2 set for this study. Chapter V describes in detail the
mathematical concepts involved in the Linear Prediction analysis and synthesis of the
Punjabi speech sentences. It accomplishes objective 3 set for this project. In Chapter VI,
the spectrographic analysis is conducted by using Praat and MATLAB where the graphs
for formant frequencies, intensity, pitch, V/UV contours, and the Fast Fourier Transform
(FFT) of the speech waveforms have been plotted to gain additional insight into the
results obtained in Chapter V. The graphical analysis evaluating the newly-designed
coding scheme PUNJARPAbet is also included in Chapter VI. Chapter VII summarizes
the whole work, highlighting the original contribution of this project. This chapter
concludes by stating the future directions.
The thesis also includes five Appendices. Appendix A and Appendix B include
the Text Corpus developed in this project. Appendix A includes about 200 sentences and
single line folk songs (bolis) while Appendix B includes more than 100 bolis. In both
appendices, the complete corpus has been transcribed both in the IPA and the newly
developed phonetic alphabet PUNJARPAbet. Appendix C describes the Levinson-
Durbin algorithm to efficiently solve the Normal Equations resulting from the
Autocorrelation Method for the linear prediction analysis. Appendix D includes the SIFT
algorithm for computing the V/UV decision and the pitch extraction. Appendix E lists
twenty-five Punjabi speech sentences synthesized in the present study.
The thesis concludes by listing the Bibliography of various publications and
websites cited in this work.
■
ix
Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected]
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
The following papers have been published in refereed International/National Journals.
Presentations have been given at six different organizations/universities in Canada and
India based on the work completed during this project.
Papers Published (Refereed Journals and International Conferences):
1. Surinder Dhanjal and Satvinder Singh Bhatia; “PUNJARPAbet: A New Phonetic
Alphabet for Speech Processing in the Punjabi Language”; Journal of Circuits,
Systems, and Computers, World Scientific Publishing Co.; Vol. 23, No. 5, June
2014 (DOI: 10.1142/S0218126614500704) (SCI)
2. Surinder Dhanjal and Satvinder Singh Bhatia; “Punjabi Speech Processing: LP
Analysis and Synthesis”; 4th World Conference on Innovation and Computer
Sciences (INSODE-2014), Rome, Italy; April 11-13, 2014 (accepted for
publication in AWERProcedia Information Technology and Computer Science).
3. Surinder Dhanjal and Satvinder Singh Bhatia; “Development of a Standard Text
and Speech Corpus for the Punjabi Language”; 16th International Oriental
COCOSDA / Conference on Asian Spoken Language Research and Evaluation
(CASLRE) 2013 Conference, KIIT Gurgaon, India; Nov 25-27, 2013.
- (IEEE Xplore Digital Library DOI: 10.1109/ICSDA.2013.6709891)
- Shortlisted by Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY),
MC&IT, Government of India for upload on TDIL (Technology Development for
Indian Languages) Data Center (http://tdil-dc.in) portal*.
4. Surinder Dhanjal and Satvinder Singh Bhatia; “Computerization of the Punjabi
Language: L.P. Analysis and Synthesis”; PARKH (biannual Journal), Panjab
University, Chandigarh, India; Vol. I, Jan-June 2013, pp. 179-188.
5. Surinder Dhanjal and Satvinder Singh Bhatia, “A New Corpus for the Punjabi
Speech Processing”, International Symposium on Frontiers of Research on Music
and Speech (FRSM-2012); Kamrah International Institute of Technology (KIIT),
Gurgaon, India; Jan 18-19, 2012; pp. 223-227.
6. Surinder Dhanjal and Satvinder Singh Bhatia, “Computerization of the Punjabi
Language”, 2nd World Punjabi Conference; Panjab University, Chandigarh; Feb
24-25, 2009.
x
Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected]
