Raja Noor Ainon

University of Malaya | UM · Department of Biology

The development of an HMM-based speech synthesis system for a new language requires resources like speech database and segment-phonetic labels. As an under-resourced language, Malay lacks the necessary resources for the development of such a system, especially segment-phonetic labels. This research aims at developing an HMM-based speech synthesis s...

This paper presents our work towards developing a new speech corpus for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which can be used for implementing and evaluating Arabic speaker-independent, large vocabulary, automatic, and continuous speech recognition systems. The speech corpus was recorded by 40 (20 male and 20 female) Arabic native speakers from 11 countr...

In the present paper, a fuzzy rule-based system (FRBS) is designed to serve as a decision support system for Coronary heart disease (CHD) diagnosis that not only considers the decision accuracy of the rules but also their transparency at the same time. To achieve the two above mentioned objectives, we apply a multi-objective genetic algorithm to op...

This paper describes and proposes an efficient and effective framework for the design and development of a speaker-independent continuous automatic Arabic speech recognition system based on a phonetically rich and balanced speech corpus. The speech corpus contains a total of 415 sentences recorded by 40 (20 male and 20 female) Arabic native speaker...

This paper describes the preparation, recording, analyzing, and evaluation of a new speech corpus for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The speech corpus contains a total of 415 sentences recorded by 40 (20 male and 20 female) Arabic native speakers from 11 different Arab countries representing three major regions (Levant, Gulf, and Africa). Three hund...

This research reports the development and evaluation of Malay emotional voice corpora through listening evaluation, and how the numbers of emotion choices offered to evaluators affect the result of the evaluation. The voice corpora comprises of three emotions, namely anger, sadness and happiness being expressed by two male and two female actors. Th...

This paper concerns the incorporation of naturalness into Malay Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems through the addition of a culturally-localized affective component. Previous studies on emotion theories were examined to draw up assumptions about emotions. These studies also include the findings from observations by anthropologists and researchers on cul...

This research reports the development of an HMM-based speech synthesis system for Malay, which is an under-resourced language with few resources including recorded speech and segmental labels. We propose the cross-lingual use of resources for developing a Malay HMM-based speech synthesis system. We used the Festival English speech synthesis system...

Speech is tbe primary means of communication between people. For reasons ranging from technology curiosity about the mechanism for mechanical realization of human speech capabilities. To the desire to automate simple tasks inherently requiring human-machine interactions. There have been many interesting advances and developments since the invention...

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is gammg its importance due to the vast growth generally in technology and computing in specific. From industrial perspective, computers, laptops, and mobile devices nowadays have the ASR support embedded into the operating system. From academia on the other hand, there are many research efforts being conducted ad...

This paper discusses an emotional prosody generator for a Malay speech synthesis system that can re-synthesize the selected vocal emotion from neutral synthesized speech output and improve the naturalness by adopting rule-based prosody conversion techniques. The role of prosodic features in emotional expression, particularly fundamental frequency a...

The increase in proliferation of mobile devices and wireless technologies in recent years has opened up new challenges in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). This growth has also led to an increase in demand of applications such as streaming video, multi-player interactive games and financial services such as real-time stock quotes. Such applications i...

Being current formal linguistic standard and only acceptable form of Arabic language for all native speakers, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) still lacks sufficient spoken corpora compared to other forms like Dialectal Arabic. This paper describes our work towards developing a new speech corpus for MSA, which can be used for implementing and evaluatin...

This paper aims at identifying the factors that would help to diagnose acute myocardial infarction (AMI) using data from an electronic medical record system (EMR) and then generating structure decisions in the form of linguistic fuzzy rules to help predict and understand the outcome of the diagnosis. Since there is a tradeoff in the fuzzy system be...

This paper describes an efficient framework for designing and developing Arabic speaker-independent continuous automatic speech recognition systems based on a phonetically rich and balanced speech corpus. The speech corpus contains 415 sentences recorded by 42 (21 male and 21 female) Arabic native speakers from 11 Arab countries representing three...

During the last fifteen years, soft computing methods have been successfully applied in building powerful and flexible credit scoring models and have been suggested to be a possible alternative to statistical methods. In this survey, the main soft computing methods applied in credit scoring models are presented and the advantages as well as the lim...

Credit risk evaluation systems play an important role in the financial decision-making by enabling faster credit decisions, reducing the cost of credit analysis and diminishing possible risks. Credit scoring is the most commonly used technique for evaluating the creditworthiness of the credit applicants. The credit models built with this technique...

This paper presents the development of an automatic test case generator (ATCG) for testing safety-critical software systems based on the concepts of specification-based testing. The ATCG receives the specification of system under test in normal specification language form and the causes and effects are automatically extracted and it also will visua...

This research aims at developing a real-time HMM-based Malay emotional speech synthesis (EM-HTS) that has the ability to synthesize any form of text input in four different expression which are neutral, anger, sadness and happiness. The quality of the emotional speech synthesis was improved by using Neutral to Angry, Sad, and Happy (NASH) duration...

Due to the inherent complexity of many real-world problems, classification models have become an important tool for solving pattern recognition tasks in many disciplines such as medicine, finance and management. Accuracy and transparency are two important criteria that should be satisfied by any classification model. In this paper, a transparent an...

In this paper we discuss the development and implementation of an automated speaker-independent isolated Malay digit speech recognition system. The system is developed using Neuro-Fuzzy approach that combines the human-like reasoning style of fuzzy systems and the learning and connectionist structure of neural networks. To recognize the Malay speec...

The rapid development of technologies and steadily growing amounts of digital information highlight the need of developing an accessing system. Content-based image indexing and retrieval has been an important research area in computer science for the last few decades. The approaches of content-based image retrieval using low level features such as...

Transparent decision support systems in the finance sector have an important role in the analysis and the decision process. This paper proposes a relatively transparent credit scoring model for evaluating the creditworthiness of the credit applicants through a hybrid data mining approach. The main motivation to apply this approach is to obtain a cr...

The manipulation of prosody, including pitch, duration and intensity, is one of the leading approaches in synthesizing emotion. This paper reports work on the development of a Malay Emotional synthesizer capable of expressing four basic emotions, namely happiness, anger, sadness and fear for any form of text input with various intonation patterns u...

Traditionally, text is stored on computers as a strewn of characters. The goal of this research is to store text in a form that facilitates word manipulation whilst reducing storage space. A word list with syntactic linear ordering is stored and words in a text are given two-byte integer codes that point to their respective positions in this list....

The school timetabling problem is essentially the construction of a timetable for each teacher and class that satisfies the teacher requirements and which does not violate the condition that no teacher or class is scheduled more than once in the same time period. It belongs to a class of scheduling problems which is highly constrained and which is...

Usability is defined as the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use. As the majority of unusable software is due to usability errors as opposed to functional errors, it is of utmost importance that usability evaluation and measu...