Hidden Markov Model:

theorical recall & applications

Claudio Zito
ABSTRACT
Although iniatially introduced and studied in the late 1960s and early
1970s, statistical methods of Markov source or Hidden Markov
modelling have become increasingly popular in the last two decades.
There are two strong reasons why this has occured. First the models are
very rich of in mathematical structure and hence can form the theorical
basis for use in a wide range of applications. Second, the models, when
applicated proprerly, work very well in practice for several importatn
applications.
In the first part of this paper we attempt to review theorical aspects of this
type of statistical modelling, focusing on the three basic problems for
Hidden Markov Model. We present the solution to each of the three
fundamental problems which it has been adopted in speech synthesis
context.
In the second part of this paper we show a short introduction to the
branch of speech synthesis. We shortly cover its history from first
approches until the current state of the art, focusing on the HMM-based
speech synthesis system in which speech waveform is generated from
HMMs themself.
The relation between the HMM-based approch and other unit selection
approches is also discussed.

REFERENCES
L.R. Rabinier. A tutorial on Hidden Markov Models and Selected
Applications in Speech Recognition. In Proceeding IEEE, 77(2):257-
285, 1989
K. Tokuda, H. Zen, A.W. Black, AN HMM-BASED SPEECH
SYNTHESIS SYSTEM APPLIED TO ENGLISH, 2002
History and Development of Speech Synthesis, url:
http://www.acoustics.hut.fi/publications/files/theses/lemmetty_mst/chap2.
html
HMM-based Speech Synthesis System (HTS), url:
http://hts.sp.nitech.ac.jp/
Effective Multilingua Interaction in Mobile Environments (EMIME),
url: http://www.emime.org/learn/speech-synthesis/read/tutorial-slides-of-
hmm-based-speech-synthesis