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Preface
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and developed new testing methodologies, and provided a systematic assessment
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of MITalk’s output speech quality.
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Throughout all of the research, many important individual projects were com-
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pleted which focused on issues in speech analysis and processing, and in linguis-
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tics. The many participants in these endeavors focused individually on a variety of
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important research issues, but they also shared in the motivation provided by the
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goals of the overall system, as well as in the daily interaction with others involved
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in complementary aspects of the system. This tension between individual research
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and overall system building evolved with MITalk, and provided each contributor
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with a strong sense of satisfaction derived not only from individual efforts, but also
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from the system’s overall achievement.
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In the summer of 1979, it was felt that the MITalk system was at a suf-
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ficiently complete state that a specialized, intensive course devoted to its exposi-
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tion was appropriate. Accordingly, from June 25th through June 29th, a special
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short course was offered. Lectures covered all modules of the MITalk system, and
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laboratory exercises combined with demonstrations provided further contact with
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the system. The individuals involved with the course included J. Allen,
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D. H. Klatt, M. S. Hunnicutt, R. Carlson, B. Granstrom, and D. Pisoni. In ad-
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dition, a set of notes for this course was developed. M. S. Hunnicutt wrote the
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sections of the notes covering text preprocessing, morphological analysis, phrase-
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level parsing, morphophonemics and stress adjustment, letter-to-sound and lexical
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stress, and fundamental frequency contour generation. D. H. Klatt wrote the sec-
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tions on speech synthesis technology and the Klatt formant synthesizer.
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D. H. Klatt, R. Carlson, and B. Granstrom wrote the sections on the phonological
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component, the prosodic component, and the phonetic component. D. Pisoni wrote
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the section on measurement of intelligibility and comprehension directly
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reproduced as Chapter 13 of the present volume. J. Allen provided the introduc-
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tion, a section on implementation, and the summary. These notes have constituted
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the most comprehensive overview of MITalk until the publication of this book.
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Since 1979, the MITalk system has been available for license, and has been
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acquired by many industrial firms and universities. Bell Northern Research ac-
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quired the system for research purposes and recoded it in VAX-VMS PASCAL.
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They have kindly supplied a copy of their version to us. In turn, this version was
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converted to run under Berkeley 4.2 BSD UNIX, using the syntax of Berkeley
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PASCAL, although some routines in the new version are written in C. This latest
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version was accomplished by R. Armstrong, and it has many new features. The
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most notable feature is the overall control structure which easily permits assem-
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