Abstract: This paper presents a rule-based text- to- speech
(TTS) Synthesis System for Standard Malay, namely SMaTTS. The
proposed system using sinusoidal method and some pre- recorded
wave files in generating speech for the system. The use of phone
database significantly decreases the amount of computer memory
space used, thus making the system very light and embeddable. The
overall system was comprised of two phases the Natural Language
Processing (NLP) that consisted of the high-level processing of text
analysis, phonetic analysis, text normalization and morphophonemic
module. The module was designed specially for SM to overcome
few problems in defining the rules for SM orthography system before
it can be passed to the DSP module. The second phase is the Digital
Signal Processing (DSP) which operated on the low-level process of
the speech waveform generation. A developed an intelligible and
adequately natural sounding formant-based speech synthesis system
with a light and user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) is
introduced. A Standard Malay Language (SM) phoneme set and an
inclusive set of phone database have been constructed carefully for
this phone-based speech synthesizer. By applying the generative
phonology, a comprehensive letter-to-sound (LTS) rules and a
pronunciation lexicon have been invented for SMaTTS. As for the
evaluation tests, a set of Diagnostic Rhyme Test (DRT) word list was
compiled and several experiments have been performed to evaluate
the quality of the synthesized speech by analyzing the Mean Opinion
Score (MOS) obtained. The overall performance of the system as
well as the room for improvements was thoroughly discussed.
Abstract: Brand name plays a vital role for in-shop buying
behavior of consumers and mutated brand name may affect the
selling of leading branded products. In Indian market, there are many
products with mutated brand names which are either orthographically
or phonologically similar. Due to presence of such products, Indian
consumers very often fall under confusion when buying some
regularly used stuff. Authors of the present paper have attempted to
demonstrate relationship between less attention and false recognition
of mutated brand names during a product selection process. To
achieve this goal, visual attention study was conducted on 15 male
college students using eye-tracker against a mutated brand name and
errors in recognition were noted using questionnaire. Statistical
analysis of the acquired data revealed that there was more false
recognition of mutated brand name when less attention was paid
during selection of favorite product. Moreover, it was perceived that
eye tracking is an effective tool for analyzing false recognition of
brand name mutation.