No abstract

Synthesizing tones plays an important role in text-to-speech systems of tonal languages. To accomplish this, the two important steps are to determine the pitch markers of voice utterances and synthesize F0 trajectories for lexical tones. In this paper, we propose two efficient algorithms, one of them is to locate the pitch markers at the peaks of the cumulative signal of each voiced part of the input utterance and the other is to generate F0 trajectories of tones with quantitative target approximation (qTA) parameters of Xu model. The experimentation has shown that the proposed algorithms present pitch markers with high accuracy which has enabled us to generate tones with complex shapes.

No abstract

Depth of an excavated trench plays a vital role on stability as well as economic efficency of an open trench. As design and analysis excavation construction method, selection of an appropriate excavated depth value of a trench without support structures is necessary. In practice, excavated trench is usually located above ground water table or under unsaturated soil condition. Therefore, the depth of unsupported trench is significantly affected by unsaturated soil properties, especially suction distribution and physical properties of soil as well. To date, there have been a few theories and research works reported on the method of determining a suitable depth of a trench under unsaturated condition. However, previous works tend to assume that the distribution of soil suction is either constant or linear with depth; as a result of this assumption, the designed results are often overestimated compared to practical results. In this paper, the effect of nonlinear distribution of suction was taken into account to propose an equation to estimate the depth of an excavated trench without support structures. Eventually, an example of numerical computation was executed to figure out the factors that affect the depth of excavated trend considering non linear suction distribution of unsaturated soils.