An HMM-based speech synthesis framework is applied to both Standard Austrian German and a Viennese dialectal variety and several training strategies for multi-dialect modeling such as dialect clustering and dialect-adaptive training are investigated. For bridging the gap between processing on the level of HMMs and on the linguistic level, we add phonological transformations to the HMM interpolation and apply them to dialect interpolation. The crucial steps are to employ several formalized phonological rules between Austrian German and Viennese dialect as constraints for the HMM interpolation. We verify the effectiveness of this strategy in a number of perceptual evaluations. Since the HMM space used is not articulatory but acoustic space, there are some variations in evaluation results between the phonological rules. However, in general we obtained good evaluation results which show that listeners can perceive both continuous and categorical changes of dialect varieties by using phonological transformations employed as switching rules in the HMM interpolation.

We analyze preferences and the reading flow of users of a popular Austrian online newspaper. Unlike traditional news filtering approaches, we postulate that a user's preference for particular articles depends not only on the topic and on propositional contents, but also on the user's current context and on more subtle attributes. Our assumption is motivated by the observation that many people read newspapers because they actually enjoy the process. Such sentiments depend on a complex variety of factors. The present study is part of an ongoing effort to bring more advanced personalization to online media. Towards this end, we present a systematic evaluation of the merit of contextual and non-propositional features based on real-life clickstream and postings data. Furthermore, we assess the impact of different recommendation strategies on the learning performance of our system.

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