Dr. Joao Paulo Cabral

• Séamus Lawless, Peter Lavin, Mostafa Bayomi, João P. Cabral and M. Rami Ghorab, Text Summarization and Speech Synthesis for the Automated Generation of Personalized Audio Presentations, 20th International Conference on Application of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB), Passau, germany, June 17-19, edited by Springer , Springer, 2015, pp307 - 320Conference Paper, 2015, DOI , URL
• Yuyun, Huang, Christy Elias., Cabral, João P. Cabral, Atul Nautiyal, Christian Saam and Nick Campbell, Towards Classification of Engagement in Human Interaction with Talking Robots, Communications in Computer and Information Science , 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Los Angeles, USA, 2-7 August 2015, 528, Springer, 2015, pp741 - 746Published Abstract, 2015, DOI , URL
• Elias Christy, João P. Cabral and Nick Campbell, Audio features for the Classification of Engagement, Workshop on Engagement in Social Intelligent Virtual Agents, Delft, Netherlands, 25th August 2015, 2015, pp8 - 12Conference Paper, 2015, URL , TARA - Full Text
• João P. Cabral, Yuyun Huang, Christy Elias, Ketong Su and Nick Campbell, Interface for Monitoring of Engagement from Audio-Visual Cues, The 1st Joint Conference on Facial Analysis, Animation, and Auditory-Visual Speech Processing, Vienna, Austria, 11-13 Septmeber, ISCA, 2015Poster, 2015, URL
• Eva Vanmassenhove, João P. Cabral, Fasih Haider, Prediction of Emotions from Text using Sentiment Analysis for Expressive Speech Synthesis, 9th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis, Sunnyvale, CA, USA, 13-15 September, 2016, pp22 - 27Conference Paper, 2016, URL , TARA - Full Text
• João P. Cabral, Christian Saam, Eva Vanmassenhove, Stephen Bradley, Fasih Haider, The ADAPT entry to the Blizzard Challenge 2016, Blizzard Challenge 2016 Workshop, Cupertino, CA, USA, 2016Conference Paper, 2016, URL
• João P. Cabral, Benjamin R. Cowan, Katja Zibrek, Rachel McDonnell, The Influence of Synthetic Voice on the Evaluation of a Virtual Character, Interspeech 2017, Stockholm, Sweden, 20-24 August, ISCA, 2017, pp229 - 233Conference Paper, 2017, DOI , URL , TARA - Full Text
• Beatriz R. de Medeiros and João P. Cabral, Acoustic distinctions between speech and singing: Is singing acoustically more stable than speech?, Speech Prosody, Poznań, Poland, 13-16 June, 2018, pp542 - 546Conference Paper, 2018, URL , TARA - Full Text
• João P. Cabral, Estimation of the Asymmetry Parameter of the Glottal Flow Waveform Using the Electroglottographic Signal, INTERSPEECH 2018, Hyderabad, India, 2-6 Septmeber, 2018Conference Paper, 2018
• Leigh Clark, João Cabral, Benjamin Cowan, The CogSIS Project: Examining the Cognitive Effects of Speech Interface Synthesis, British Human Computer Interaction Conference, Belfast, 2-6 July, 2018Conference Paper, 2018, URL , TARA - Full Text
• Leigh Clark, Philip Doyle, Diego Garaialde, Emer Gilmartin, Stephan Schögl, Jens Edlund, Matthew Aylett, Cosmin Munteanu, João P. Cabral, and Benjamin R. Cowan, The State of Speech in HCI: Trends, Themes and Challenges, Interacting with Computers, 2019Journal Article, 2019
• João P. Cabral and Alexsandro R. Meireles, Transformation of voice quality in singing using glottal source features, Workshop on Speech, Music and Mind 2019 (SMM 2019), Vienna, Austria, 14 September 2019, ISCA, 2019, pp31 - 35Conference Paper, 2019, URL
• Benjamin R. Cowan, Philip Doyle, Justin Edwards, Diego Garaialde, Ali Hayes-Brady, Holly P. Branigan, João Cabral, Leigh Clark, What's in an accent? The impact of accented synthetic speech on lexical choice in human-machine dialogue, the 1st International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces, Dublin, Ireland, 2019Conference Paper, 2019, URL
• Éva Székely Zeeshan Ahmed, João P. Cabral and Julie Carson-Berndsen, WinkTalk: A Demonstration of a Multimodal Speech Synthesis Platform Linking Facial Expressions to Expressive Synthetic Voices, the Third Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies, Montreal, Canada, 7 June, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2012, pp5 - 8Conference Paper, 2012, TARA - Full Text
• Beatriz Raposo de Medeiros, João Paulo Cabral, Alexsandro R. Meireles, and Andre A. Baceti, A comparative study of fundamental frequency stability between speech and singing, Speech Communication, 128, 2021, p15 - 23Journal Article, 2021, DOI
• Katja Zibrek, Joao Cabral, Rachel McDonnell, Does Synthetic Voice Alter Social Response to a Photorealistic Character in Virtual Reality?, Motion, Interaction and Games (MIG), Virtual Event, Switzerland, Association for Computing Machinery, 2021, pp1 - 6Conference Paper, 2021, URL
• Darragh Higgins, Katja Zibrek, Joao Cabral, Donal Egan, Rachel McDonnell, Sympathy for the digital: Influence of synthetic voice on affinity, social presence and empathy for photorealistic virtual humans, Computers & Graphics, 2022Journal Article, 2022, URL
• João P. Cabral, Nick Campbell, Sree Ganesh, Mina Kheirkhah, Emer Gilmartin, Fasih Haider, Eamonn Kenny, Andrew Murphy, Neasa Ní, Chiaráin, Thomas Pellegrini and Odei Rey Orozko, MILLA: A Multimodal Interactive Language Learning Agent, SemDial 2014, Edinburgh, United Kingdom, September 1st-3rd, 2014Conference Paper, 2014, URL
• João P. Cabral, Steve Renals, Korin Richmond and Junichi Yamagishi, Glottal Spectral Separation for Speech Synthesis, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing: Special Issue on Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis, 8, (2), 2014, p195 - 208Journal Article, 2014, DOI , URL
• Éva Székely, Zeeshan Ahmed, Shannon Hennig, João P. Cabral and Julie Carson-Berndsen, Predicting synthetic voice style from facial expressions. An application for augmented conversations, Speech Communication, 57, 2014, p63 - 75Journal Article, 2014, DOI , URL
• João P. Cabral, Uniform Concatenative Excitation Model for Synthesising Speech without Voiced/Unvoiced Classification, INTERSPEECH, Lyon, France, August 2013, edited by International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) , 2013, pp1082 - 1085Conference Paper, 2013, URL
• Zeeshan Ahmed and João P. Cabral, HMM-Based Speech Synthesiser For The Urdu Language, Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages (SLTU), Saint Petersburg, Russia, 14 May, 2014, pp92 - 97Conference Paper, 2014, DOI , URL , TARA - Full Text
• João P. Cabral and Julie Carson-Berndsen, Towards a Better Representation of Glottal Pulse Shape Characteristics in Modelling the Envelope Modulation of Aspiration Noise, Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Advances in Nonlinear Speech Processing, NOLISP International Conference, Mons, Belgium, 19-21 June, edited by Thomas Drugman and Thierry Dutoit , 7911, 2013, pp67 - 74Conference Paper, 2013, DOI , URL
• Udochukwu Kalu Ogbureke, João P. Cabral and Julie Carson-Berndsen, Explicit Duration Modelling in HMM-based Speech Synthesis using a Hybrid Hidden Markov Model-Multilayer Perceptron, SAPA - SCALE Conference, Portland, USA, 7-8 September, 2012Conference Paper, 2012, URL
• Udochukwu Kalu Ogbureke, João P. Cabral and Julie Carson-Berndsen, Explicit Duration Modelling in HMM-based Speech Synthesis Using Continuous Hidden Markov Model, International Conference on Information Sciences, Signal Processing and their Applications (ISSPA 2012), Montreal, Canada, 3-5 July, IEEE, 2012, pp700 - 705Conference Paper, 2012, DOI
• Udochukwu Kalu Ogbureke, João P. Cabral and Julie Carson-Berndsen, Using multilayer perceptron for voicing strength estimation in HMM-based speech synthesis, International Conference on Information Sciences, Signal Processing and their Applications (ISSPA 2012), Montreal, Canada, 2-5 July, IEEE, 2012, pp683 - 688Conference Paper, 2012, DOI , URL
• Amalia Zahra, João P. Cabral, Mark Kane and Julie Carson-Berndsen, Automatic Classification of Pronunciation Errors Using Decision Trees and Speech Recognition Technology, International Symposium on Automatic Detection of Errors in Pronunciation Training (IS ADEPT), Stockholm, Sweden, 6-8 June, 2012, pp65 - 69Conference Paper, 2012, URL
• Udochukwu Kalu Ogbureke, João P. Cabral and Julie Carson-Berndsen, Using Noisy Speech to Study the Robustness of a Continuous F0 Modelling Method in HMM-based Speech Synthesis, International Conference on Speech Prosody, Shanghai, China, 22-25 May, 2012, pp67 - 70Conference Paper, 2012, URL
• João P. Cabral, Mark Kane, Zeeshan Ahmed, Mohamed Abou-Zleikha, Éva Székely, Amalia Zahra, Udochukwu Kalu Ogbureke, Peter Cahill, Julie Carson-Berndsen, Stephan Schlögl, Rapidly Testing the Interaction Model of a Pronunciation Training System via Wizard-of-Oz, International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), Istanbul, Turkey, 21-27 May, 2012, pp23 - 25Conference Paper, 2012, URL
• Mark Kane, João P. Cabral, Amalia Zahra and Julie Carson-Berndsen, Introducing Difficulty-Levels in Pronunciation Learning, International Speech Communication Association Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE), Venice, Italy, 24-26 August, International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), 2011, pp37 - 40Conference Paper, 2011, TARA - Full Text
• João P. Cabral, John Kane, Christer Gobl and Julie Carson-Berndsen, Evaluation of glottal epoch detection algorithms on different voice types, INTERSPEECH, Florence, Italy, 28-31 August, International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), 2011, pp1989 - 1992Conference Paper, 2011
• Éva Székely, João P. Cabral, Peter Cahill and Julie Carson-Berndsen, Clustering Expressive Speech Styles in Audiobooks Using Glottal Source Parameters, INTERSPEECH, Florence, Italy, International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), 2011, pp2409 - 2412Conference Paper, 2011
• João P. Cabral, Steve Renals, Junichi Yamagishi and Korin Richmond, HMM-based speech synthesiser using the LF-model of the glottal source, International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Prague, Czech Republic, 22-27 May, IEEE, 2011, pp4704 - 4707Conference Paper, 2011, DOI , URL
• João P. Cabral, Steve Renals, Korin Richmond and Junichi Yamagishi, An HMM-based speech synthesiser using glottal post-filtering, 7th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW7), Kyoto, Japan, 2010, pp365 - 370Conference Paper, 2010, URL
• J. Sebastian Andersson, João P. Cabral, Leornado Badino, Junichi Yamagishi and Robert A.J. Clark, Glottal source and prosodic prominence modelling in HMM-based speech synthesis for the Blizzard Challenge 2009, The Blizzard Challenge 2009, Edinburgh, UK, 4 Septmeber, 2009Conference Paper, 2009, URL
• João P. Cabral, Steve Renals, Korin Richmond and Junichi Yamagishi, "HMM-based speech synthesis with an acoustic glottal source model, The First Young Researchers Workshop in Speech Technology, Dublin, Ireland, 25 April, 2009Conference Paper, 2009, TARA - Full Text
• João P. Cabral, Steve Renals, Korin Richmond and Junichi Yamagishi, Glottal Spectral Separation for Parametric Speech Synthesis, INTERSPEECH 2008, Brisbane, Australia, 22-26 September, International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), 2008, pp1829 - 1832Conference Paper, 2008, URL
• João P. Cabral, Steve Renals, Korin Richmond and Junichi Yamagishi, Towards an Improved Modeling of the Glottal Source in Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis, 6th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis (SSW6), Bonn, Germany, 22-24 August, International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), 2007, pp113 - 118Conference Paper, 2007, URL
• Guilherme Raimundo, João P. Cabral, Celso Melo, Luís C. Oliveira, Ana Paiva, Isabel Trancoso , Telling Stories with a Synthetic Character: Understanding Inter-modalities Relations, Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Verbal and Nonverbal Communication Behaviours, COST Action 2102 International Workshop on Verbal and Nonverbal Communication Behaviours, Vietri sul Mare, Italy, 29-31 March, 4775, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2007, pp310 - 323Conference Paper, 2007, DOI
• João P. Cabral and Luís C. Oliveira, EmoVoice: A System to Generate Emotions in Speech, INTERSPEECH, Pittsburgh, USA, 17-21 Septmeber, International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), 2006, pp1798 - 1801Conference Paper, 2006, URL
• João P. Cabral, Luís C. Oliveira, Guilherme Raimundo, Ana Paiva, What voice do we expect from a synthetic character?, 11th International Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2006), St. Petersburg, Russia, 26-29 June, 2006Conference Paper, 2006
• João P. Cabral and Luís C. Oliveira, Pitch-Synchronous Time-Scaling for Prosodic and Voice Quality Transformations, INTERSPEECH, Lisbon, Portugal, 4-8 September, International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), 2005, pp1137 - 1140Conference Paper, 2005, URL
• João P. Cabral and Luís C. Oliveira, Pitch-Synchronous Time-Scaling for High-Frequency Excitation Regeneration, INTERSPEECH, Lisbon, Portugal, 4-8 September, International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), 2005, pp1513 - 1516Conference Paper, 2005, URL
• João Paulo Cabral, HMM-based Speech Synthesis Using an Acoustic Glottal Source Model, The University of Edinburgh, 2010Thesis, 2010, URL
• João P. Cabral, Transforming Prosody and Voice Quality to Generate Emotions in Speech, Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), 2006Thesis, 2006, URL
• João P. Cabral, Evaluation of Methods for Excitation Regeneration in Bandwidth Extension of Speech, Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), 2003Thesis, 2003

• Peter Cahill, Udochukwu Ogbureke, Jo ̃ao Cabral, Eva Szekely,Mohamed Abou-Zleikha, Zeeshan Ahmed and Julie Carson-Berndsen, UCD Blizzard Challenge 2011 Entry, Blizzard Challenge Workshop 2011, Turin, Italy, 2 September, 2011Conference Paper

My main research work in on Text-To-Speech synthesis (TTS) and development of innovative commercial applications of this research, such as expressive AI voices for Audiobooks, Spoken Dialogue Systems, and Animation. I'm also interested in analysis of emotion and affect in speech. I've great expertise in analysis and modelling of glottal source parameters. These features are important in TTS for better transforming the type of voice, such as breathy or tense voices, and emotions. Other areas of expertise include speech signal processing, statistical learning algorithms for speech processing and deep learning.

• Title

  CogSIS - Cognitive Effects of Speech Interface Synthesis
  Summary

  Through the growth of intelligent personal assistants, pervasive and wearable computing and robot based technologies speech interfaces are set to become a common dialogue partner. Technological challenges around the production of natural synthetic voices have been widely researched. Yet comparatively little is understood about how synthesis affects user experience, in particular how design decisions around naturalness (e.g. accent used and expressivity) impact the assumptions we make about speech interfaces as communicative actors (i.e. our partner models). Our ground-breaking project examines the psychological consequences of synthesis design decisions on the relationship between humans and speech technology. It fuses knowledge, concepts and methods from psycholinguistics, experimental psychology, and human-computer interaction (e.g. perspective taking and partner modelling research in human-human dialogue, controlled experiments, questionnaires) and speech technology (generation of natural speech synthesis) to 1) understand how synthesis design choices, specifically accent and expressivity, impact a user's partner model, 2) how these choices interact with context and 3) impact language production.
  Funding Agency

  Irish Research Council
  Date From

  2017
  Date To

  2018
• Title

  Expressive Speech Synthesis: VoiceTune
  Summary

  Research project to develop expressive Text-to-Speech commercial applications for industry. The project aims to validate prototype product/service and commercial value to companies that need AI expressive voice solutions.
  Funding Agency

  Enterprise Ireland
  Date From

  2020
  Date To

  2022
• Title

  Production, Perception and Cognition in the interception between speech and singing
  Summary

  The issue raised in this project is that although we know how to intuitively distinguish between speech and singing, there are portions of each in which one perceives the coexistence of both and this suggests that there is a gradation, more than an abrupt change in phonation and other aspects of speech. The aim of this research project is to focus on some aspects of production and perception of speech and singing in order to answer the question: Are speech and singing completely different phenomena? Experimental studies are conducted that include: collection of a corpus of spoken and singing data, measurements of acoustic differences between the two types of data, a perception test which aims to designate the presented stimulus as speaking or singing, and to use machine learning to further study the acoustic differences between the two sound categories. The results are analysed by taking into account cognitive aspects of speech and song.
  Funding Agency

  São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)
  Date From

  2016
  Date To

  2017

Communication engineering and systems; telecommunications, Computer science - Artificial Intelligence,

• Member of the Marie Curie Fellows Association (MCFA)
• Member of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)