Banca de DEFESA: THALES AGUIAR DE LIMA

Uma banca de DEFESA de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : THALES AGUIAR DE LIMA
DATE: 16/12/2022
TIME: 08:30
LOCAL: https://shu.zoom.us/my/profmarjory
TITLE:

An Investigation of Accent Inclusion in Brazilian Portuguese Speech

KEY WORDS:

speech biometrics, accent inclusion, Brazilian Portuguese, speech corpus,
dataset.

PAGES: 70
BIG AREA: Ciências Exatas e da Terra
AREA: Ciência da Computação
SUBÁREA: Metodologia e Técnicas da Computação
SPECIALTY: Processamento Gráfico (Graphics)
SUMMARY:

Speech is a very important part of our way to communicate as a species and combined
with the evolution of instant messaging in voice format as well as automated chatbots,
its importance has become even greater. While the majority of speech technologies have
achieved high accuracy, they fail when tested for accents that deviate from the “standard”
of a language. This becomes more concerning for languages that lack on datasets and
have scarce literature, like Brazilian Portuguese. In a parallel development, artificial
intelligence(AI)-based tools are an accepted increasingly present in people’s lives, even
if not always noticeable. This excluding behaviour combined with the advancement of
AI in speech systems and the lack of resources, have inspired the three objectives of
this work. Thus, this thesis proposes to explore news ways for Accent Conversion for
this language, adapting a light-weight model called SABr+Res, which must convert from
PaulistatoNordestino. The second is to provide an acoustic analysis of Brazilian Portuguese
accents, covering a wide area of the national territory, finding and formalising possible
differences between them. Finally, to collect and release a speech dataset for Brazilian
Portuguese. With a method that explores the availability of data and information in
video platforms, the method automatically downloads the videos from TEDx Talks. Those
short presentations are a source of reliable and clean audio with human and automatically
generated transcriptions

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Presidente - 2524467 - MARJORY CRISTIANY DA COSTA ABREU
Interno - 2177445 - BRUNO MOTTA DE CARVALHO
Interna - 2859606 - SILVIA MARIA DINIZ MONTEIRO MAIA
Externo à Instituição - ALTAIR OLIVO SANTIN - PUCPR
Externo à Instituição - MARCOS ANTONIO SIMPLICIO JUNIOR - USP