Generation and Analysis of Vowel Polygons for Syrian Dialects Using a Created Speech Database

Speech databases form the main foundation in the construction of automatic utterance, speaker recognition and speech recognition systems in different languages and dialects. The elements of the speech database are audio files recorded for people's voices in the required language or dialect. The more the speech database is enriched with comprehensive elements the more it contributes to produce systems that communicate with the excellent performed machine. According to the lack of speech databases for the Syrian dialects, the research did one. The created database contained sixteen voluntaries from different Syrian dialects. Voluntaries' voices were recorded in different recording conditions that is for studying the effect of variety of dialects, gender and the conditions of recording on the vowel polygons. This research invested the created speech database in the field of generating and analyzing of vowel polygons, as the vowel polygon is a geometric polygon where its vertices represent the values of formant frequencies, and the area of the polygon represents the output acoustic space.

Smoker Distinction Based on Analysis of Created Vowel Triangles

In this research, a new comparison criterion was proposed to study properties of the audio signal for each of the varieties of smokers and non-smoking persons. For this purpose, a database for smokers has been created. The smoker database contains 12 Syrian native speakers, six of them were smokers and the others were non-smokers. The smokers had been smoking for more than 10 years. All speakers were men and their ages ranging between 35 and 42 years old. They live in rural towns and speak the same dialect. Syrian vowels can be classified into long vowels and short ones. The long vowels are /AA/, /UU/, /II/ pronounced as ([ ي, و, ا ]) and the short vowels are /A/, /U/, /I/ pronounced as ([ كسرة, ضمة, فتحة ]). In this study, the Speakers have to pronounce the following sentence /I love Syria/ pronounced as ([ أَنَاْ أَحَبُّ سُوْرِيْة ]), and it was spoken during three hours. This sentence is rich with vowels. For each speaker, a long vowel triangle in ten planes and a short vowel triangle in ten planes as well were generated and analyzed. A new criterion was suggested to determine the most suitable vowel triangle for smoker distinction. This criterion depends on calculating the different distances among all centers of vowel triangles in each plane and determining the minimal distance called d. For each plane, the most suitable vowel triangle had been set as AIU35 short vowel triangle and AAIIUU45 long vowel triangle.