October 2015

WCAD is an intonation modeling algorithm based on using the weighted correlation as a cost function in the matching pursuit framework.

To run WCAD, clone it from git and start wcad.py.

git clone git@github.com:dipteam/wcad.git
cd wcad
# Edit paths.cfg to match your configuration
./wcad.py $path_to_audio/$my_wav.wav $path_to_results

To run WCAD you need a compiled binary for the pitch tracker compute-kaldi-pitch-feats from Kaldi. WCAD uses it to get a continuous pitch estimate and a probability of voicing. Kaldi's code can be found here. Once compiled you need to add the path to the binary in the file ./paths.cfg.

The code supports Praat TextGrid annotations for extracting the utterance boundaries and for plotting syllables/words/phones in the final plots. By default these should be in a folder called annotations/ in the audio folder. This functionality is added with the inclusion of textgrid.py from the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), which can be found here. By default, the use of TextGrid files is deactivated. To use TextGrid functionalities, please edit wcad/object_types/params.py by setting self.plot_textgrids to True. You can also set the speech start and end detection used for phrase extraction to use the TextGrid annotations instead of energy, by setting self.fix_pos_ref_func to 'energy'.

Most of the algorithm parameters can be tweaked in the file wcad/object_types/params.py.

The Weighted Correlation Atom Decomposition algorithm is described in the paper:

Branislav Gerazov, Pierre-Edouard Honnet, Aleksandar Gjoreski, and Philip N. Garner, "Weighted Correlation based Atom Decomposition Intonation Modelling," in Proc. of Interspeech 2015, Dresden, Germany, Sep 06 - 10, 2015.

@inproceedings{Gerazov2015,
    author = {Gerazov, Branislav and Honnet, Pierre-Edouard and Gjoreski, Aleksandar and Garner, Philip N.},
    title = {Weighted Correlation based Atom Decomposition Intonation Modelling},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of Interspeech},
    location = {Dresden, Germany},
    month = {Sep},
    year = {2015}
}

Branislav Gerazov

DIPteam

Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies

Ss Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje,

Macedonia