Homepage Esther Klabbers

Address information:

Esther Klabbers
Center for Spoken Language Understanding
OGI School of Science & Engineering at OHSU
20000 NW Walker Road
Beaverton, Oregon 97006
klabbers@cslu.ogi.edu
phone: (503) 748 3005
fax: (503) 748 1306

Research Interests

Personalizing text-to-speech voices in AAC devices.
Analyzing and modeling of different affects (emotions, i.e., angry, happy, etc) for use in text-to-speech synthesis systems.
Perception of duration and pitch in Parkinson's patients.
Modeling pitch contours in text-to-speech synthesis systems using the superpositional approach to intonation.
Modeling segmental duration prediction in text-to-speech synthesis systems using the Bell-Labs sums-of-products model.
Perception of spectral discontinuities in concatenative text-to-speech synthesis.

Grants

National Institute of Health, "SBIR Phase I: Computer-based auditory skill building program for aural (re)habilitation" (PI)
Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation, "In Your Own Voice": Personal AAC Voices for Minimally Verbal Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
National Institute of Health, "STTR Phase I: User Adaptation of AAC Device Voices"

Education

PhD in Speech Synthesis (Language and Computer Science) in 2000
at IPO, Center for User-System Interaction at Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
MA in Language and Computer Science in 1996
at University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands
BA in English Language and Literature in 1992
at University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands

Professional Experience

Assistant Professor, 2008 - Present,
CSLU, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR
Assistant Scientist, 2007-April 2008,
CSLU, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR
Senior Scientist, 2007-Present,
Biospeech, Inc., Portland, OR
Senior Research Associate, 2001-2006,
CSLU, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR
Postdoc, 2000,
IPO, Center for User-System Interaction, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
Winter Research Intern, 1999,
Lucent Technologies, NJ
Summer Research Intern, 1996,
KPN Research, Leidschendam, the Netherlands

Reviews

Journals

IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing: 2004-2006
Speech Communication: 2007-present

Conferences

ICPhS 2007, Interspeech 2007
Human Language Technologies: The Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT) : 2007
International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP): 2006
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL): 2005

Workshops

6th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Bonn, Germany, 2007
5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Pittsburgh, PA, 2004

Courses

CS 553 / CS 653 - Speech Synthesis
Credits: 3
Description: This course will introduce students to the problem of synthesizing speech from text input. Speech synthesis is a challenging area that draws on expertise from a diverse set of scientific fields, including signal processing, linguistics, psychology, statistics, and artificial intelligence. Fundamental advances in each of these areas will be needed to achieve truly human-like synthesis quality and advances in other realms of speech technology (like speech recognition, speech coding, speech enhancement). In this course, we will consider current approaches to sub-problems such as text analysis, pronunciation, linguistic analysis of prosody, and generation of the speech waveform. Lectures, demonstrations, and readings of relevant literature in the area will be supplemented by student lab exercises using hands-on tools.

CS 506 / CS 606 - Computational Approaches to Speech and Language Disorders
Credits: 3
Description: This course covers a range of speech and language analysis algorithms that have been developed for measurement of speech or language based markers of neurological disorders, for the creation of assistive devices, and for remedial applications. Topics will include introduction to speech and language disorders, robust speech signal processing, statistical approaches to pitch and timing modeling, voice transformation algorithms, speech segmentation, and modeling of disfluency. The class will use a wide array of clinical data, and will be closely tied to several ongoing research projects.

Publications

2008

J. van Santen, T. Mishra, and E. Klabbers (2008), "Prosodic Processing", In J. Benesty, M. Sondhi, and Y. Huang (Eds.), Springer Handbook of Speech Processing, Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 471-488.

2007

J. van Santen, E. Klabbers, and T. Mishra (2007), "Towards measurement of pitch alignment", Italian Journal of Linguistics. Special issue on "Autosegmental-metrical approaches to intonation in Europe: tonal targets and anchors", pp. 161-188.
E. Klabbers, T. Mishra, and J. van Santen (2007), Analysis of affective speech recordings using the superpositional intonation model, Proceedings of the 6th ISCA workshop on speech synthesis (SSW6), pp. 339-344, Bonn, Germany.
E. Klabbers, J. van Santen, A. Kain (2007)."The contribution of various sources of spectral mismatch to audible discontinuities in a diphone database", IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing Journal, 15(3), pp. 949-956.

2006

Q. Miao, X. Niu, E. Klabbers, and J. van Santen (2006). "Effects of Prosodic Factors on Spectral Balance: Analysis and Synthesis", Proceedings Speech Prosody 2006, Dresden, Germany
T. Mishra, J. van Santen and E. Klabbers (2006). Decomposition of pitch curves in the general superpositional model, Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2006, Dresden, Germany.

2005

Y. Pantazis, Y. Stylianou, and E. Klabbers (2005), Discontinuity detection in concatenated speech synthesis based on nonlinear speech analysis, Proceedings EUROSPEECH 2005, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 2817 - 2820.
J. van Santen, A. Kain, E. Klabbers and T. Mishra (2005). Synthesis of prosody using multi-level sequence units, Speech Communication, 46(3-4), 365-375, July 2005, Quantitative Prosody Modelling for Natural Speech Description and Generation.
Esther Klabbers, Jan van Santen and Johan Wouters (2005). Minimizing the amount of pitch modification in speech synthesis, in S. Narayanan and A. Alwan (eds). Text to Speech synthesis: New Paradigms and Advances, Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference, Upper Saddle River, NJ, pp. 89-107.

2004

J. van Santen, T. Mishra, and E. Klabbers (2004). Estimating phrase curves in the general superpositional model, Proceedings ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop 5, Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 61-66.
Esther Klabbers and Jan van Santen (2004). Clustering of foot-based pitch contours in expressive speech, Proceedings ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop 5, Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 73-78.
Jan van Santen, Alexander Kain and Esther Klabbers (2004). Synthesis by recombination of segmental and prosodic information, International Conference on Speech Prosody 2004, Nara, Japan.

2003

Esther Klabbers and Jan van Santen (2003). Control and prediction of the impact of pitch modification on synthetic speech quality, EUROSPEECH'03, Geneva, Switzerland, p317-320.

Taniya Mishra, Esther Klabbers and Jan van Santen (2003). Detection of list-type sentences, EUROSPEECH'03, Geneva, Switzerland, p2477-2480.

Jan van Santen, Lois Black, Gilead Cohen, Esther Klabbers, Taniya Mishra, Jacques de Villiers and Xiaochuan Niu (2003). Applications of computer generated expressive speech for communication disorders, EUROSPEECH'03, Geneva, Switzerland, p1657-1660

Raymond Veldhuis and Esther Klabbers (2003). On the computation of the Kullback-Leibler measure for spectral distances, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, vol. 11, no. 1, January 2003, p100-103.

2002

Esther Klabbers, Jan van Santen and Johan Wouters (2002). Prosodic factors for predicting local pitch shape, IEEE 2002 Workshop on Speech Synthesis, Santa Monica, CA, September 11-13 2002.

2001

Esther Klabbers, Karlheinz Stöber (2001). Creation of speech corpora for the multilingual Bonn Open Synthesis System, 4th ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Speech Synthesis, Pitlochry, Scotland, p23-27 (ps).

M. Theune, E. Klabbers, J. Odijk, J.R. de Pijper and E. Krahmer (2001). From Data to Speech: A General Approach, Natural Language Engineering7(1), p47-86 (ps).

Esther Klabbers, Karlheinz Stöber, Raymond Veldhuis, Petra Wagner and Stefan Breuer (2001). Speech synthesis development made easy: The Bonn Open Synthesis System, EUROSPEECH 2001, Aalborg, Denmark, volume I, 521-524 (ps).

Esther Klabbers and Raymond Veldhuis (2001). Reducing audible spectral discontinuities, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, vol. 9, no. 1, January 2001, p39-51.

2000

Esther Klabbers, Raymond Veldhuis and Kim Koppen (2000). A solution to the reduction of concatenation artefacts in speech synthesis, Proceedings ICSLP 2000, Beijing, China, volume III, 474-477 (ps).

Esther Klabbers and Jan van Santen (2000). Predicting segmental durations for Dutch using the sums-of-products approach, Proceedings ICSLP 2000, Beijing, China, volume III, 670-673. (ps)

Esther Klabbers (2000). Segmental and Prosodic Improvements to Speech Generation, PhD Thesis, Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE).

1998

Esther Klabbers and Rene Collier (1998). On the performance of speech output in a practical setting, IPO Annual Progress Report 33, Eindhoven, p121-128 (ps).

Esther Klabbers and Raymond Veldhuis (1998). On the reduction of concatenation artefacts in diphone synthesis, Proceedings ICSLP'98, Sydney, Australia, p1983 - 1986 (ps).

Esther Klabbers, Emiel Krahmer and Mariët Theune (1998). A generic algorithm for generating spoken monologues, Proceedings ICSLP'98, Sydney, Australia, p2759-2762. (ps)

1997

E. Klabbers (1997).High-quality speech output generation through advanced phrase concatenation, Proceedings of the COST Workshop on Speech Technology in the Public Telephone Network: Where are we today?, Rhodes, Greece, p85-88 (ps).

M. Theune, E. Klabbers, J. Odijk and J.R. de Pijper (1997). Computing Prosodic Properties in a Data-to-Speech System, Proceedings of the Workshop on Concept-to-Speech Generation Systems, ACL/EACL, Madrid, p39-45 (ps).

Esther Klabbers (1997).Speech Output Generation in GoalGetter, Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands, Papers from the Seventh CLIN Meeting, Eindhoven, p57-68 (ps).

M. Theune en E. Klabbers (1997). Gebruik van taal en spraak in informatiesystemen, NWO Annual Report 1997, p103-106 (MS-Word document).

1996

Esther Klabbers, Jan Odijk, Jan-Roelof de Pijper and Mariët Theune (1996). GoalGetter: From Teletext to Speech, IPO Annual Progress Report 31, Eindhoven, p66-75 (ps).

M. Theune, E. Klabbers, J. Odijk and J.R. de Pijper (1996). From Data to Speech: A Generic Approach, IPO manuscript 1202 (ps).