Indian languages are broadly classified as Indo-Aryan or Dravidian. The basic set of phones is more or less the same, varying mostly in the phonotactics across languages. There has also been borrowing of sounds and words across languages over time due to intermixing of cultures. Since syllables are fundamental units of speech production and Indian languages are characterised by syllable-timed rhythm, acoustic analysis of syllables has been carried out. In this paper, instances of common and most frequent syllables in continuous speech have been studied across six Indian languages, from both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian language groups. The distributions of acoustic features have been compared across these languages. This kind of analysis is useful for developing speech technologies in a multilingual scenario. Owing to similarities in the languages, text-to-speech (TTS) synthesisers have been developed by segmenting speech data at the phone level using hidden Markov models (HMM) from other languages as initial models. Degradation mean opinion scores and word error rates indicate that the quality of synthesised speech is comparable to that of TTSes developed by segmenting the data using language-specific HMMs.

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The availability of the Internet at the click of a mouse brings with it a host of new problems. Although the World Wide Web was first started by physicists at CERN to enable collation and exchange of data, today, it is used for a wide range of applications. The requirements on bandwidth for each of the applications is also varied. An Internet Service Provider must ensure satisfaction across the entire spectrum of users. To ensure this, analysis of Internet usage becomes essential. Further, an administrator can keep a record of user's Internet activity and prevent unethical activities, since the Internet is also an excellent resource for providing anonymity. This analysis can also help in resource provisioning and monitoring. In this work, a web-based tool is first proposed to analyse the Internet activity. Next, data is collected from a proxy server at a campus-wide network. Traffic patterns of different types of users are studied. Finally, the paper concludes with strategies for monitoring and control of traffic.

This paper presents an analysis of syllable rhythm in different types of languages, namely syllable-timed and stress-timed. Four Indian languages that are syllable-timed and American English and Scottish English, that are stress-timed are used for the study. This analysis attempts to bring the similarity or differences between the two types of languages in terms of syllable rhythm at the level of prosodic phrases. Two different studies are performed, namely, the number of syllables that make up a prosodic phrase and the ratio of number of syllables in adjacent prosodic phrases. Different probability distributions are fitted to the data and the goodness of fit is determined using quantilequantile plot. The key contribution of this paper is the observation that the total number of syllables in a sentence, number of syllables in individual prosodic phrases and the ratio of number of syllables between pairs of adjacent prosodic phrases in declarative sentences uniformly (across all languages) follow a Gamma distribution.