Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion using Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper proposes an acoustic-to-articulatory inversion using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). We present a schematic and a detailed design of the acoustic-to-articulatory inversion system. The system is implemented by using Praat script and Java, with VocalTractLab as a speech synthesizer. The target data of our synthetic utterance are 5 disyllabic utterances consisting of 9 Thai monophthongs. For each syllable, the synthetic utterances are synthesized from 15 articulatory parameters by which their values are estimated using PSO with inertia weight. The fitness values of the system are evaluated in the term of the sum of the squared errors (SSEs) of these articulatory parameter values. To assess the results, the original and the synthetic utterances are compared in the forms of spectrograms, and F1-F3 formant frequency contours. For our system results, the good agreement between the original and synthetic utterance was achieved for F1 and F2.