Alan W Black Associate Professor Language Technologies Institute Carnegie Mellon University Office: 5701 Gates Hillman Complex 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA Tel. 1-412-268-6299 Fax. 1-412-268-6298 email: awb@cs.cmu.edu www: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb

Research Goals

• Practical implementations of computational theories of speech and language
• Making computer speech synthesis as natural, flexible, and efficient as human speech.

Current Research Interests

• The Blizzard Challenge 2007 Evaluating corpus-based speech synthesis on common databases. See the call for participation and timeline.
• "Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis" special session at ICASSP-2007 in Hawaii, Wednesday, April 18, 09:30 - 11:30
• Interspeech 2006 — ICSLP the 9th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing will be held in Pittsburgh, PA, 17-22nd September 2006.
• 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop June 14-16th 2004, Carnegie Mellon University: Proceedings
• CMU SPICE Speech Processing - Interactive Creation and Evaluation Toolkit for New Languages: automatically building recognition and synthesis support in new languages.
• Evaluation and Personalization of Synthetic Voices
• TRANSFORM: flexible voice synthesis through articulatory voice transformation
• Speech Synthesis for telling children's stories:
  • ESPER Extracting Speaker Information From Children's Stories for Speech Synthesis.
• Let's Go: designing better spoken dialog systems for the elderly and non-natives.
• Speech-to-speech translation: Transtac (Iraqi), LASER ACTD (Thai), Babylon (Arabic) and Tongues (Croatian).
• Flite a small fast run-time synthesis engine. Providing fast resource-light scalable speech synthesis for speech technology applications.
• The FestVox project: providing automated methods for building new voices and languages for speech synthesis.
• Finding automatic training techniques to build domain specific synthesis voices to capture individual style, domain and prosodic characteristics.
• The University of Edinburgh's Festival Speech Synthesis System for general multi-lingual text to speech.

Teaching

• Chair of of Undergraduate Program in charge of the Undergraduate Minor in Language Technologies.
• Fall '09: 15-492/18-492: Speech Processing.
• Fall '09: 15-291: Computational Intelligence Lab (COIN Lab).
• Fall '09: 11-733: Multilingual Speech-to-Speech Translation Lab. Build your own speech-to-speech system in a language of your choice, with Tanja Schultz and Stephan Vogel and
• Spring '09: 11-752: Speech: Phonetics, prosody, perception and synthesis taught with Maxine Eskenazi.
• Spring '07: 11-754: Speech lab with Alex Rudnicky
• Spring '09: 11-722: Grammar Formalisms taught with Lori Levin, Lectures given by awb and Categorial Grammar Homework optional.
• Joint Speech Seminar with Tanja Schultz and Maxine Eskenazi.

Synthesis Group: Gopala Krishna Anumanchipalli, Tina Bennett, S P Kishore, John Kominek, Brian Langner, and Arthur Toth.

Slides and audio samples of recent talks I have given.

Other interesting things

• Pictures of Mr Black
• Voice of Mr Black the awb_arctic voices are based on Mr Black.
• Biographical Sketch of Mr Black
• Running Unix on an IBM PC110 palmtop computer
• Running Unix on a Casio E-105 Palm-sized PC

Publications

Software

• Hephaestus, a collection of open source projects related to all aspects of speech distributed by CMU
• Flite a small fast run-time speech synthesis engine. Yet another addition to the suite for free software tools and engines for speech synthesis.
  • CMU Flite home page
• The Festvox project: documentation, scripts, tools and examples of building new synthetic voices in the Festival Speech Synthesis System. This contains enough basic information, scripts, autolabellers and walkthroughs for an interested person to build a complete new synthetic voice for English and other languages.
  • http://festvox.org
• NSW: non-standard words: Standardizing how text is normalized using the techniques developed at the Johns Hopkins University Summer Workshop 1999 project on Normalization of Non-Standard Words
  • http://festvox.org/nsw/
• The Festival Speech Synthesis System, is a general purpose text to speech system offering both a development environment for synthesis techniques and a robust multi-lingual text to speech system. Festival offers a Scheme-based interpreter for high-level control of the C++ objects that do most of the real work. Work in Festival is currently concentrated on using statistical language processing techniques for text analysis, e.g. part of speech tagging, tokenization, superficial syntactic parsing etc. See here for demos. A full source distribution for most Unix systems (and Windows), is available for free for commercial and non-commercial use under an X11-type licence.
  • Festival home page
• CHATR: a generic speech synthesis system. This system developed at ATR offers multi-lingual synthesis for English and Japanese (with Korean and German closely following). Its main waveform synthesis technique uses non-uniform unit selection from speech databases using acoustic and prosodic features. It can build a voice from any phonetically labelled database. The system allows real-time text to speech, as well as offering a development environment for investigating new speech synthesis techniques. The system is portable and has been tested on seven different common Unix platforms.
• ASTL: This software offers a situation theoretic language which can be used to describe many contemporary semantic theories such as DRT, Dynamic Logic, Montague Grammar and Situation Semantics. It is especially good with donkeys. This is written in Common Lisp, and includes some small examples.
  • astl-0.4.tar.gz
• GNU Tools for Minix 386: This (now old code) provided the first ports of gcc, emacs and gdb to the cheap, though not free, Unix-like system Minix (but does include full sources). Linux was first developed using this compiler. This work has been superseded by the more substantial free Unix systems Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
  • Minix GCC
• MAP-3.1: a morphological analyser and lexicon system. This was developed as part of the UK ALVEY Natural Language Tools project but is now available separately without licence. This is written in Common Lisp and allows users to design, test and use practical lexicons and morphological analysers. It includes a substantial manual for both the non-programmer and programmer who wishes to embed this system in larger natural language systems. A substantial English dictionary (8000 stems) and morphological analyser is included.
  • MAP3.1.tar.gz

Papers

2008

• E. Veera Raghavendra, Srinivas Desai, B Yegnanarayana, Alan W Black, Kishore Prahallad Global Syllable Set for Building Speech Synthesis in Indian Languages in Proceedings of IEEE workshop on Spoken Language Technologies, Goa, India, December 2008. (pdf)
• E. Veera Raghavendra, B Yegnanarayana, Alan W Black, Kishore Prahallad Building Sleek Synthesizer for Multi-lingual Screen Reader in Proceedings of Interspeech, Brisbane, Australia, September 2008 (pdf)
• Kominek, J., Badaskar, S., Schultz, T. and Black, A. Improving Speech Systems Built from Very Little Data, Interspeech 2008, Brisbane, Australia. (pdf)
• Toth, A., and Black, A. Incorporating durational modification in voice transformation, Interspeech 2008, Brisbane, Australia. (pdf)
• Eskenazi, M., Black, A., Raux, A. and Langner, B. Let's Go Lab: a platform for evaluation of spoken dialog systems with real world users, Interspeech 2008, Brisbane, Australia. (pdf)
• E. Veera Raghavendra, Srinivas Desai, B Yegnanarayana, Alan W Black, Kishore Prahallad, Blizzard 2008: Experiments on Unit Size for Unit Selection Speech Synthesis in Blizzard Challenge 2008 workshop, Brisbane, Australia, September 2008 (pdf)
• Alan W Black, Christina L. Bennett, John Kominek, Brian Langner, Kishore Prahallad, Arthur Toth CMU Blizzard 2008: Optimally using a large database for unit selection synthesis in Blizzard Challenge 2008 workshop, Brisbane, Australia, September 2008 (pdf)
• Udhyakumar Nallasamy, Alan W Black, Tanja Schultz, Robert Frederking and Jerry Weltman, Speech Translation for Triage of Emergency Phone calls in Minority Languages Speech Translation for Medical and Other Safety-Critical Applications (SLT4MED), International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), Manchester, England, 2008.
• Udhyakumar, N., Black, A. Schultz, T, Frederking, R. NineOneOne: Recognizing and classifying speech for handling minority language emergency calls, LREC 2008 Marakesh, Morocco. (pdf)
• Raux, A., Langner, B., Black, A. and Eskenazi, M. Building Practical Spoken Dialog Systems ACL/HLT 2008 Tutorial, Columbus, Ohio.
• Kominek, J., Schultz, T. and Black, A. Synthesizer voice quality on new languages calibrated with mel-cepstral distorion, SLTU 2008, Hanoi, Vietnam. (pdf)
• Jin, Q., Toth, A., Black, A. and Schultz, T. Is voice transformation a threat to speaker identification?, ICASSP2008, Las Vegas, NV. (pdf)
• Anumanchipalli, G., Prahallad, K. and Black A. (2008) Significance of Early Tagged Contextual Graphemes in Grapheme Based Speech Synthesis and Recognition Systems, ICASSP2008, Las Vegas, NV. (pdf)
• Schultz, T. and Black, A. (2008) Rapid Language Adaptation Tools and Technologies for Multilingual Speech Processing Systems, ICASSP2008, Tutorial.
• Toda, T., Black, A., and Tokuda, K. (2008) Statistical mapping between articulatory movements and acoustic spectrum using a Gaussian mixture model, Speech Communiation, Vol. 50, No. 3, pp. 215-227, Mar. 2008

• Toda, T., Black, A., and Tokuda, K. (2007) Voice Conversion Based on Maximum-Likelihood Estimation of Spectral Parameter Trajectory IEEE Transations of Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 15(8) pp 2222-2236.
• Bach, N., Eck, M, Charoenpornsawat, P., Koehler, T., Stueker, S., Nyugen, T., Hsiao, R., Waibel, A., Schultz, T., and Black, A. (2007) The CMU TransTac 2007 Eyes-free and Hands-free two-way speech-to-speech translation systems IWSLT 2007, Trento, Italy. (pdf)
• Black, A. (2007) Speech Synthesis for Educational Technology SLaTE Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education, Farmington, PA. (pdf)
• Prahallad, K., Toth, A. and Black, A. (2007) Automatic Building of Synthetic Voices from Large Multi-Paragraph Speech Databases Interspeech 2007, Antwerp, Belgium. (pdf)
• Langner, B., and Black, A. uGloss: A Framework for Improving Spoken Language Generation Understandability Interspeech 2007, Antwerp, Belgium. (pdf)
• Schultz, T., Black, A., Badaskar, S., Hornyak, M., and Kominek, J. (2007) SPICE: Web-based Tools for Rapid Language Adaptation in Speech Processing Systems Interspeech 2007, Antwerp, Belgium. (pdf)
• Black, A., Bennett, C., Blanchard, B., Kominek, J., Langner, B.. Prahallad, K., Toth, A. (2007). CMU Blizzard 2007: a hybrid acoustic unit selection system from statistically predicted parameters Blizzard Challenge 2007 Workshop, Bonn, Germany. (pdf)
• Langner, B., and Black A. (2007), Understandable Production of Massive Synthesis, ISCA SSW6, Bonn Germany. (pdf)
• Kominek, J., Schultz, T., and Black. A. (2007) Voice Building from Insufficient Data - Classroom Experiences with Web-Based Language Development Tools, ISCA SSW6, Bonn Germany. (pdf)
• Zen, H., Nose, T., Yamagishi, J., Sako, S., Masuko, T., Black, A., and Tokuda, K. (2007) The HMM-based Speech Synthesis System (HTS) Version 2.0, ISCA SSW6, Bonn Germany. (pdf)
• Raj, A., Sarkar, T., Pammi, S. C., Yuvaraj S., Bansal, M., Prahallad K., and Black, A. (2007) Text Processing for Text-to-Speech Systems in Indian Languages, ISCA SSW6, Bonn Germany. (pdf)
• Toth A., and Black A. (2007) Using Articulatory Position Data in Voice Transformation, ISCA SSW6, Bonn Germany. (pdf)
• Kumar R., Gangadharaiah R., Rao S., Prahallad K., Rose C. Black, A. (2007) Building a Better Indian English Voice Using "More Data", ISCA SSW6, Bonn Germany. (pdf)
• Black, A., Zen, H., and Tokuda, K, (2007) Statistical Parametric Synthesis, ICASSP 2007, Hawaii. (pdf)

2006

• Bohus, D., Langner, B., Raux, A., Black, A., Eskenazi, M., and Rudnicky, A. (2006), Online Supervised Learning of Non-understanding Recovery Policies, SLT 2006, Aruba.
• Black, A. (2006), CLUSTERGEN: A Statistical Parametric Synthesizer using Trajectory Modeling, Interspeech 2006 - ICSLP, Pittsburgh, PA. (pdf)
• Langner, B., Kumar, R., Chan, A. Gu, L., and Black A. (2006), Generating Time-Constrained Audio Presentations of Structured Information, Interspeech 2006 - ICSLP, Pittsburgh, PA. (pdf)
• Hsiao, R., Venugopal, A., Zhang, Y., Zollman, A., Koehler, T., Charoenpornsawat, P., Vogel, S., Black, A., Schultz, T., and Waibel, A. Optimizing Components for Handheld Two-way Speech Translation for an English Iraqi Arabic system, Interspeech 2006 - ICSLP, Pittsburgh, PA. (pdf)
• Raux, A., Bohus, D., Langner, B., Black, A., and Eskenazi, M. (2006) Doing Research on a Deployed Spoken Dialogue System: One Year of Let's Go! Experience, Interspeech 2006 - ICSLP, Pittsburgh, PA. (pdf)
• Tomokiyo, L., Peterson, K., Black, A., and Lenzo, K. (2006) Intelligibility of Machine Translation Output in Speech Synthesis, Interspeech 2006 - ICSLP, Pittsburgh, PA. (pdf)
• Black, A., Tokuda, K., King, S., Hirai, T., Picheny, M. and Nakamura S.(2005) Blizzard Challenge -- 2006: satellite workshop of Interspeech 2006, Pittsburgh, PA. (papers)
• Bennett, C. and Black, A. (2006), The Blizzard Challenge 2006, Blizzard Challenge 2006, Pittsburgh, PA. (pdf)
• Kominek, J. and Black, A. (2006), The Blizzard Challenge 2006 CMU Entry introducing hybrid trajectory-selection synthesis, Blizzard Challenge 2006, Pittsburgh, PA. (pdf)
• Kominek, J, and Black, A. (2006) Learning Pronunciation Dictionaries: Language Complexity and Word Selection Strategies, Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the NAACL, pp 232--239, New York City, USA. (pdf).
• Tokuda, K. and Black, A. (2006) The Blizzard Challenge (in Japanese), tutorial paper at Acoustic Society of Japan. (pdf).
• Black, A. (2006) "Multilingual Speech Synthesis" in Multilingual Speech Processing eds Schultz, T. and Kirchhoff, K., Elsevier, Academic Press.
• Huggins-Daines, D., Kumar, M., Chan, A., Mosur, R., Black, A. and Rudnicky, A. (2006) POCKETSPHINX: A Free, Real-Time Continuous Speech Recognition System for Hand-Held Devices ICASSP2006, Toulouse, France (pdf).
• Suendermann, D., Hoege, H., Bonafonte, A., Ney, H., Black, A., and Narayanan, S. (2006) Text-Independent Voice Conversion Based on Unit Selection ICASSP2006, Toulouse, France (pdf).
• Prahallad, K., Black, A. and Mosur, R. (2006) Sub-Phonetic Modeling for Capturing Pronunciation Variation in Conversational Speech Synthesis ICASSP2006, Toulouse, France (pdf).
• Toth, A. and Black, A. (2006) Visual Evaluation of Voice Transformation Based on Knowledge of Speaker ICASSP2006, Toulouse, France (pdf).
• Schultz, T. and Black, A. (2006) Challenges with Rapid Adaptation of Speech Translation Systems to New Language Pairs ICASSP2006, Toulouse, France (pdf).
• Black, A. and Schultz, T. (2006), Speaker Clustering for Multilingual Synthesis , Proceedings of the ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Multilingual Speech and Language Processing, Stellenbosch, South Africa. (pdf)
• Tomokiyo, L., Sisson, C. and Black A. (2006), Mixed-mode Multilinguality in TTS: The Case of Canadian French, Proceedings of the ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Multilingual Speech and Language Processing, Stellenbosch, South Africa. (pdf)
• Schultz, T., Black, A., Vogel, S. and Woszczyna, M. (2006), Flexible Speech-to-Speech Translation Systems IEEE Transactions in Speech and Audio Processing, vol 14 no 2 403-411 March 2006.

• Langner, B. and Black, A. (2005), Using Speech in Noise to Improve Understandability for Elderly Listeners ASRU 2005, San Juan, Puerto Rico. (pdf)
• Suendermann, D., Hoege H., Bonafonte, A., Ney, H., and Black A. (2005) Residual Prediction Based on Unit Selection ASRU 2005, San Juan, Puerto Rico. (pdf)
• Prahallad K and Black A, (2005) A text to speech interface for Universal Digital Library, Journal of Zhejiang University SCIENCE, vol.6A, no.11, pp. 1229-1234, Oct 2005 (pdf)
• Black, A., and Tokuda, K., (2005) Blizzard Challenge -- 2005: special session at Interspeech 2005, Lisbon Portgal. (papers)
• Black, A., and Tokuda, K., (2005) Blizzard Challenge -- 2005: Evaluating corpus-based speech synthesis on common datasets Interspeech 2005, Lisbon, Portugal. (pdf)
• Toth, A., and Black, A., (2005) Cross-Speaker Articulatory Position Data for Phonetic Feature Prediction Interspeech 2005, Lisbon, Portugal. (pdf)
• Tomokiyo, L., Black, A., and Lenzo, K. (2005) Foreign Accents in Synthesis: Development and Evaluation Interspeech 2005, Lisbon, Portugal. (pdf)
• Raux, A., Langner, B., Bohus, D., Black, A., and Eskenazi, M. (2005) Let's Go Public! Taking a Spoken Dialog System to the Real World Interspeech 2005, Lisbon, Portugal. (pdf)
• Kominek, J. and Black, A (2005) Measuring Unsupervised and Acoustic Clustering through Phoneme Pair Merge-and-Split Tests Interspeech 2005, Lisbon, Portugal. (pdf)
• Suebvisai, S., Charoenpornsawat, P., Black, A., Woszczyna, M., and Schultz, T., (2005) Thai Automatic Speech Recognition, ICASSP, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (pdf)
• Langner, B. and Black, A. (2005), Improving the Understandability of Speech Synthesis by Modeling Speech in Noise ICASSP, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (pdf)
• Bennett, C. and Black, A., (2005) Prediction of Pronunciation Variations for Speech Synthesis: A Data-driven approach ICASSP, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (pdf)
• Toda, T., Black, A., and Tokuda, K. (2005) Spectral Conversion Based on Maximum Likelihood Estimation Considering Global Variance of Converted Parameter ICASSP, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (pdf)
• Carbonell, J., Lavie, A., Levin, L., and Black A. (2005) Language Technologies for Humanitarian Aid, in Technology for Humanitarian Action, eds K Cahill, Fordham University Press.

• Langner, B., Black, A. (2004) An Examination of Speech In Noise and its Effect on Understandability for Natural and Synthetic Speech, Carnegie Mellon University, Language Technologies Institute, Technical Report CMU-LTI-04-187. (pdf)
• Kominek, J., and Black, A. (2004) A Family-of-Models Approach to HMM-based Segmentation for Unit Selection Speech Synthesis, ICSLP2004, Jeju, Korea, (pdf)
• Toda, T., and Black, A., and Tokuda, K. (2004) Acoustic-to-Articulatory Inversion Mapping with Gaussian Mixture Model, ICSLP2004, Jeju, Korea, (pdf)
• Maskey, S., Tomokiyo, L., and Black, A. (2004) Bootstrapping Phonetic Lexicons for New Languages, ICSLP2004, Jeju, Korea, (pdf)
• Harris, T., Bannerjee, S., Rudnicky, A., Sison, J., Bodine, K. and Black, A. (2004) A research platform for multi-agent dialogue dynamics Proceedings of The IEEE International Workshop on Robotics and Human Interactive Communications. (pdf)
• Tokuda, K., Zen, H. and Black, A. (2004) An HMM-based approach to multilingual speech synthesis, in Narayanan, S. and Alwan, A. (eds) "Text to Speech Synthesis: New Paradigms and Advances", Prentice Hall.
• Toda, T., Black, A. and Tokuda, K. (2004) Mapping from Articulatory Movements to Vocal Tract Spectrum with Gaussian Mixture Model for Articulatory Speech Synthesis, pp 31-36, 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Pittsburgh, PA. (pdf)
• H/Mariam, S., Kishore, S., Black, A., Kumar, R., and Sangal, R. (2004) Unit Selection Voice for Amharic Using Festvox pp 103-107, 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Pittsburgh, PA. ( pdf )
• Kominek, J. and Black, A. (2004) Impact of durational outlier removal from unit selection catalogs pp 155-160, 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Pittsburgh, PA. ( pdf )
• Zhang, J., Toth, A., Collins-Thompson, K. and Black A. (2004) Prominence Prediction For Super-Sentential Prosodic Modeling Based On A New Database, pp 203-208, 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Pittsburgh, PA. ( pdf )
• Kominek, J. and Black, A. (2004) The CMU Arctic speech databases pp 223-224, 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Pittsburgh, PA. ( pdf )
• Langner, B. and Black, A. (2004) Creating A Database Of Speech In Noise For Unit Selection Synthesis pp 229-230, 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Pittsburgh, PA. (pdf)
• Black, A. and Lenzo, K. (2004) Multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis ICASSP 2004, Montreal, Canada. ( pdf )
• Schultz. T., Alexander, D., Black, A., Petersen, K., Suebvisai, S. and Waibel, A. (2004) A Thai Speech Translation System For Medical Dialogs HLT/NAACL 2004, Boston, MA. ( pdf )

• Raux, A. and Black, A. (2003) A Unit Selection Approach to F0 Modeling and Its Application to Emphasis ASRU 2003, St Thomas, US Virgin Is. ( pdf, )
• Black, A. and Lenzo, K. (2003) Optimal Utterance Selection for Unit Selection Speech Synthesis Databases International Journal of Speech Technology, 6(4):357-363, October 2003, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Kishore, S., Black, A., Kumar, R., and Sangal, R. (2003) Experiments with Unit Selection Speech Databases for Indian Languages Presented at National seminar on Language Technology Tools: Implementation of Telugu October 2003, Hyderabad, INDIA ( pdf )
• Kominek, J. and Black, A. (2003) CMU ARCTIC databases for speech synthesis CMU Language Technologies Institute, Tech Report CMU-LTI-03-177 (pdf, data).
• Black, A. (2003) Unit Selection and Emotional Speech, Eurospeech 2003, Geneva, Switzerland. ( pdf, html )
• Mayfield Tomokiyo, L., Black, A. and Lenzo, K. (2003) Arabic in my Hand: Small-footprint Synthesis of Egyptian Arabic, Eurospeech 2003, Geneva, Switzerland. ( pdf, html )
• Kishore, S. and Black, A. (2003) Unit Size in Unit Selection Speech Synthesis, Eurospeech 2003, Geneva, Switzerland. ( pdf, html )
• Raux, A., Langner, B., Black, A. and Eskenazi, M. (2003) LET'S GO: Improving Spoken Dialog Systems for the Elderly and Non-natives, Eurospeech 2003, Geneva, Switzerland. ( pdf, html )
• Zhang, J., Black, A. and Sproat, R. (2003) Identifying Speakers in Children's Stories for Speech Synthesis, Eurospeech 2003, Geneva, Switzerland. ( pdf, html )
• Waibel, A., Badran, A., Black, A., Frederking, R., Gates, D., Lavie, A., Levin, L., Lenzo, K., Mayfield Tomokiyo, L., Reichert, J., Schultz, T., Wallace, D., Woszczyna, M., and Zhang, J. (2003) Speechalator: two-way speech-to-speech translation on a consumer PDA, Eurospeech 2003, Geneva, Switzerland. (pdf, html)
• Bennett, C. and Black, A. (2003) Using Acoustic Models to Choose Pronunciation Variations for Synthetic Voices, Eurospeech 2003, Geneva, Switzerland. (pdf, html)
• Kominek, J., Bennett, C. and Black, A. (2003) Evaluating and Correcting Phoneme Segmentation for Unit Selection Synthesis, Eurospeech 2003, Geneva, Switzerland. (pdf, html)
• Waibel, A., Badran, A., Black, A., Frederking, R., Gates, D., Lavie, A., Levin, L., Lenzo, K., Mayfield Tomokiyo, L., Reichert, J., Schultz, T., Wallace, D., Woszczyna, M., and Zhang, J. (2003) Speechalator: two-way speech-to-speech translation in your hand Demo at HLT-NAACL2003, Edmonton, Canada. ( pdf, html )

• Black, A. (2002) Perfect Synthesis for all of the people all of the time. Keynote, IEEE TTS Workshop 2002, Santa Monica, CA. ( pdf, html, slides.pdf )
• Black, A. and Font Llitjos, A. (2002) Unit selection without a phoneme set IEEE TTS Workshop 2002, Santa Monica, CA. ( pdf, html )
• Tokuda, K., Zen, H., and Black, A. (2002) An HMM-Based Speech Synthesis System applied to English IEEE TTS Workshop 2002, Santa Monica, CA. ( pdf )
• Black, A., Brown, R., Frederking, R, Lenzo, K. Moody, J, Rudnicky, A., Singh, R., and Steinbrecher, E. (2002) Rapid Development of Speech-to-Speech Translation Systems ICSLP2002, Denver, CO. ( pdf )
• Bennett, C. Font Llitjos, A. Shriver, S., Rudnicky, A. and Black, A. (2002) Building VoiceXML-based applications ICSLP2002, Denver, CO. ( pdf, )
• Tokuda, K., Zen, H., and Black, A. (2002) An HMM-based Approach to English Speech Synthesis Proc. of Autumn Meeting of the Acoustical Society of Japan, 3-10-15, Sep. 2002.
• Lenzo, K. and Black, (2002) Customized synthesis: blending and tiering AVIOS2002, San Jose, CA.
• Frederking, R., Black, A., Brown, R., Rudnicky, A., Moody, J., and Steinbrecher, E. (2002) Speech Translation on a Tight Budget Without Enough Data, ACL-02 Workshop on Speech-to-Speech Translation: Algorithms and Systems, Philadelphia, PA.
• Black, A., Eskenazi, M. and Simmons, R. (2002) Elderly perception of speech from a computer, 143rd Meeting: Acoustical Society of America, Pittsburgh, PA, June 2002. ( slides )
• Font Llitjos, A., and Black, A. (2002) Evaluation and collection of proper name pronunciations online, LREC2002, Las Palmas, Canary Islands. ( pdf )
• Frederking, R., Black, A., Brown, R., Moody, J. and Steinbrecher, E. (2002) Field Testing the Tongues Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation System, LREC2002, Las Palmas, Canary Islands. ( pdf )
• Black, A., Brown, R., Frederking, R., Singh R., Moody, J. and Steinbrecher, E. (2002) TONGUES: Rapid Development of a Speech-to-Speech Translation System, HLT2002, San Diego, California. ( pdf, html )

• Black, A., Dusterhoff, K., and Taylor, P. (2001) Using the Tilt Intonation Model: A Data-Driven Approach, in Damper, R. (eds) "Data-Driven Techniques in Speech Synthesis", Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
• Font Llitjos, A. and Black, A. (2001) Knowledge of Language Origin Improves Pronunciation Accuracy of Proper Names, Eurospeech 2001, Aalborg, Denmark. (pdf)
• Eskenazi, M. and Black, A. (2001) A study on speech over the telephone and aging, Eurospeech 2001, Aalborg, Denmark. ( postscript, html )
• Black, A. and Lenzo, K. (2001) Optimal Data Selection for Unit Selection Synthesis, pp 63-67, ISCA, 4th Speech Synthesis Workshop, Scotland. ( postscript, html )
• Black, A. and Lenzo, K. (2001) Flite: a small fast run-time synthesis engine, pp 157-162, ISCA, 4th Speech Synthesis Workshop, Scotland. ( pdf, html )
• Sproat, R., Black, A., Chen, S., Kumar, S., Ostendorf, M. and Richards, C. (2001) Normalization of Non-standard Words, Computer Speech and Language 15(3) pp 287-333.
• Taylor, P., Black, A., and Caley, R. (2001) Hetrogeneous Relation Graphs as a Mechanism for Representing Linguistic Information, Speech Communications 33 pp 153-174.

• Black, A. and Lenzo, K. (2000) Limited Domain Synthesis, ICSLP2000, Beijing, China. ( pdf, html )
• Lenzo, K. and Black, A. (2000) Diphone collection and Synthesis, ICSLP2000, Beijing, China. ( pdf, html )
• Chotimongkol, A. and Black, A. (2000) Statistically trained orthographic to sound models for Thai, ICSLP2000, Beijing, China. ( pdf, html )
• Olinsky, C. and Black, A. (2000) Non-Standard Word and Homograph Resolution for Asian Language Text Analysis, ICSLP2000, Beijing, China. ( pdf, html )
• Shriver, S., Black, A. and Rosenfeld, R. (2000) Audio Signals in Speech Interfaces, ICSLP2000, Beijing, China. ( pdf, html )
• Rudnicky, A., Bennet, T., Black, A., Chotmongkol, A., Lenzo K., Oh, A. and Singh R. (2000) Task and Domain Specific Modelling in the Carnegie Mellon Communicator System, ICSLP2000, Beijing, China. ( pdf, html )
• Rosenfeld, R., Zhu, X., Toth, A., Shriver, S., Lenzo, K. and Black, A. (2000) Towards a Universal Speech Interface, ICSLP2000, Beijing, China. ( pdf, html )
• Black, A. and Lenzo, K. (2000) Building Voices in the Festival Speech Synthesis System, DRAFT (updated 2003) (postscript) (html)

• Paul Taylor and Alan W Black (1999). Speech Synthesis by Phonological Structure Matching, in Eurospeech99 postscript
• Janet Hitzeman, Alan W. Black, Chris Mellish Jon Oberlander, Massimo Poesio and Paul Taylor (1999). An Annotation Scheme for Concept-to-Speech Synthesis, in Proceedings of the European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, pp. 59-66. postscript
• Kurt E. Dusterhoff, Alan W. Black and Paul A. Taylor (1999). Using Decision Trees within the Tilt Intonation Model to Predict F0 Contours, in Eurospeech 99 postscript

• Black, A., Lenzo, K. and Pagel, V. (1998) Issues in Building General Letter to Sound Rules (pdf, html) 3rd ESCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis, pp. 77-80, Jenolan Caves, Australia,
• Syrdal, A., Moehler, G., Dusterhoff, K., Conkie, A, and Black, A. (1998) Three Methods of Intonation Modeling , 3rd ESCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis, pp. 305-310, Jenolan Caves, Australia, pdf
• Taylor, P., Black, A. and Caley, R. (1998) The architecture of the Festival Speech Synthesis System, (pdf, html) 3rd ESCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis, pp. 147-151, Jenolan Caves, Australia,
• Hitzeman, J., Black, A., Mellish, C., Oberlander, J. and Taylor, P. (1998) On the Use of Automatically Generated Discourse-level Information in a Concept-to-Speech Synthesis System (pdf) ICSLP98 vol 6 pp 2763-2768, Syndey, Australia.
• Pagel, V., Lenzo, K. and Black, A. (1998) Letter to sound rules for accented lexicon compression (pdf) ICSLP98, vol 5 pp 2015-2020, Syndey, Australia
• Sproat, R., Hunt, A., Ostendorf, M., Taylor, P., Black, A., Lenzo, K. and Edgington, M. (1998) SABLE: A standard for TTS markup (pdf) ICSLP98, vol 5, pp 1719-1724, Syndey, Australia, also in 3rd ESCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis, pp. 27-30, Jenolan Caves, Australia,
• Taylor, P. and Black, A. (1998). Assigning Phrase Breaks from part-of-speech Sequences (pdf, html) Computer Speech and Language 12, 99-117.

• Black, A. and Taylor, P. (1997). Assigning Phrase Breaks from Part-of-Speech Sequences (pdf, html) Proceedings of Eurospeech 97, vol2 pp 995-998, Rhodes, Greece.
• Black, A. and Taylor, P. (1997). Automatically clustering similar units for unit selection in speech synthesis (pdf, html) Proceedings of Eurospeech 97, vol2 pp 601-604, Rhodes, Greece.
• Dusterhoff, K. and Black, A. (1997). Generating F0 contours for speech synthesis using the Tilt intonation theory (postscript, html) Proceedings of ESCA Workshop of Intonation, pp 107-110, September, Athens, Greece.
• Black, A. and Taylor, P. (1997). Festival Speech Synthesis System: system documentation (1.1.1) Human Communication Research Centre Technical Report HCRC/TR-83.

• Black, A. and Hunt, A. (1996). Generating FO contours from ToBI labels using linear regression Proceedings of ICSLP 96, vol 3, pp 1385-1388, Philadelphia, Penn.
• Campbell, N and Black, A. (1996). CHATR: a multi-lingual speech re-sequencing synthesis system (In Japanese) Institute of Electronic, Information and Communication Engineers, Spring Meeting, Tokyo SP-96-07,
• Hunt, A. and Black, A. (1996). Unit selection in a concatenative speech synthesis system using a large speech database Proceedings of ICASSP 96, vol 1, pp 373-376, Atlanta, Georgia. (pdf)
• Campbell, N. and Black, A. (1996) Prosody and the Selection of Source Units for Concatenative Synthesis, in "Progress in speech synthesis", eds J. van Santen, R Sproat, J Olive and J. Hirschberg, pp 279-282, Springer Verlag.

• Black, A. and Campbell, N. (1995). Optimising selection of units from speech databases for concatenative synthesis Eurospeech 95 vol 1, pp 581-584, Madrid, Spain.
• Black, A. and Campbell, N. (1995) Predicting the intonation of discourse segments from examples in dialogue speech, (Short version) ESCA workshop on spoken dialogue systems, Denmark.
• Black, A. (1995) Predicting the intonation of discourse segments from examples in dialogue speech, ATR Workshop on Computational modeling of prosody for spontaneous speech processing. ATR, Japan. Republished in "Computing Prosody," eds. Y. Sagisaka, N. Campbell and N. Higuchi, Springer Verlag, 1997.
• Black, A. (1995) Comparison of algorithms for predicting accent placement in English speech synthesis Spring meeting of the Acoustical Society of Japan.

• Black, A. and Taylor, P. (1994) Assigning intonation elements and prosodic phrasing for English speech synthesis from high level linguistic input, ICSLP94, Yokohama, Japan.
• Taylor, P. and Black, A. (1994) Synthesizing Conversational Intonation from a Linguistically Rich Input, Proc. ESCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis, Mohonk, NY.
• Black, A. and Taylor, P. (1994) CHATR: a generic speech synthesis system, COLING94, II pp 983-986, Kyoto, Japan.
• Black, A. and Taylor, P. (1994) A framework for generating prosody from high level linguistic descriptions, Spring meeting of the Acoustical Society of Japan.

Computational Semantics

• Black, A. (1993) Some different approaches to DRT, DYANA-II deliverable, R3.2.
• Black, A. (1993), Using Situation Theory in a computational language for natural language processing, 4th Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming Conference, Nara, Japan.
• Black, A. (1993) A situation theoretic approach to computational semantics, PhD Thesis, Dept of AI, University of Edinburgh.
• Black, A. (1993), Using a computational situation theoretic language to investigate contemporary semantic formalisms, Schloss Dagstuhl Seminar IBFI, report 57.
• Black, A. (1992) Embedding DRT in a Situation Theoretic Framework, pp 1116-1120, COLING92, Nantes, France.

Language Modelling in Speech Recognition

• Foster J, Matheson C, and Black A. (1990) Modelling Linguistic Constraints for Continuous Speech Recognition Using Context Free Phrase Structure Grammar, VERBA 90, International Conference on Speech Technologies, Rome.
• Black, A. (1989) Finite State Machines from Feature Grammars, pp 277-285, International Workshop on Parsing Technologies, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.

Lexicons and Morphology

• Ritchie G, Russell G, Black A and Pulman S. (1992) Computational Morphology: practical mechanisms for the English Lexicon, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
• Black A, van de Plassche J, Williams B. (1991) Analysis of Unknown Words through Morphological Decomposition, pp 101-106, 5th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Berlin, Germany.
• Black A. (1990) A computational description of Japanese morphology, unpublished manuscript, Dept of AI, University of Edinburgh.
• Pulman S, Russell G, Ritchie G and Black A. (1988) Computational Morphology of English, Linguistics Volume 26-4:545-560.
• Black A, Ritchie G, Pulman S, and Russell G. (1987) Formalisms for Morphographemic Description, pp 11-18, Proceedings of 3rd Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Copenhagen, Denmark.
• Ritchie G, Pulman S, Black A and Russell G. (1987) A Computational Framework for Lexical Description, Journal of Computational Linguistics, 13,3-4:290-307.
• Russell G, Pulman S, Ritchie G, and Black A. (1986) Dictionary and Morphological Analyser for English., pp 277-279, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Bonn, West Germany.

Others

• Black A. (1986) Formal properties of feature grammars, unpublished paper, Dept of AI, University of Edinburgh.
• Black A. (1986) VLSI Design for Context-free Grammar Parsing, Master's Thesis, Dept of AI, University of Edinburgh.
• Black A (1984) A Knowledge Based System for Wood Anatomy and Usage Correlation, Final year dissertation, Dept of Computer Science, Coventry (Lanchester) Polytechnic.
• Black A (1984) Complexity Theory and NP-Completeness Dept of Computer Science, Coventry (Lanchester) Polytechnic.