This paper proposes a new scheme for concatenative speech synthesis to improve the speech segment selection procedure. The proposed scheme selects a segment sequence for concatenation by minimizing acoustic distortions between the selected segment and the desired spectrum for the target without the use of heuristics. Four types of distortion, a) the spectral prototypicality of a segment, b) the spectral difference between the source and target contexts, c) the degradation resulting from concatenation of phonemes, and d) the acoustic discontinuity between the concatenated segments, are formulated as acoustic quantities, and used as measures for minimization. A search method for selecting segments from a large speech database is also descrided. In this method, a three-step optimization using dynamic programming is used to minimize the four types of distortion. A perceptual test shows that this proposed segment selection method with minimum distortion criteria produces high quality synthesized speech, and that contextual spectral difference and acoustic discontinuity at the segment boundary are important measures for improving the quality.

The discrete time analysis of logic circuits is usually more efficient than the continuous time analysis, but the preciseness of the discrete time analysis is not guaranteed. The paper shows a method to decide a unit time for a logic circuit under which the analysis result is the same as the result based on the continuous time. The delay time of an element is specified with an interval between the minimum and maximum delay times, and we assume an analysis method which enumerates all possible delay cases under the deisrete time. Our main theorem is as follows: refine the unit time by a factor of 1/2, and if the analysis result with a unit time u and that with a unit time u/2 are the same, then u is the expected unit time.

This paper's main objective is to analyze several procedures which select the model g among a set G of stochastic models to minimize the value of an information criterion in the form of L(g)H[g](zn)+(k(g)/2)c(n), where zn is the n observed data emitted by an information source θ which consists of the model gθ∈G and k(gθ) mutually independent stochastic parameters in the model gθ∈G, H[g](zn) is (-1) (the maximum log likelihood value of the data zn with respect to a model g∈G), and c(n) is a predetermined function (penalty function) of n which controls the amount of penalty for increasing the model size. The result is focused on specific performances when the information criteria are applied to the framework of so-called state decomposition. Especially, upper bounds are derived of the following two performance measures for each penalty function c(n): the error probability of the model selection, and the average Kullback-Leibler information between the true information source and the estimated information source.

This paper deals with the theory and design method of an efficient radix-4 divider using carry-propagation-free adders based on redundant binary {-1,0,+1} representation. The usual method of normalizing the divisor in the range [1/2,1) eliminates the advantages of using a higher radix than two, bacause many digits of the partial remainder are required to select the quotient digits. In the radix-4 case, it is shown that it is possible to select the quotient digits to refer to only the four (in the usual normalizing method it is seven) most significant digits of the partial remainder, by scaling the divisor in the range [12/8,13/8). This leads to radix-4 dividers more effective than radix-2 ones. We use the hyperstring graph representation proposed in Ref.(18) for redundant binary adders.

The path diversity improvement inherent in direct sequence spread spectrum (DS/SS) signalling under multi-path propagation environments is investigated for mobile/personal radio communications systems that employ DPSK modulation. The bit error rate (BER) performance of post-demodulation selection diversity reception is theoretically analyzed in the presence of noise-only-paths in the time window for diversity combining. Results of laboratory experiments conducted to evaluate the BER performance are also presented. It is shown that the experimental results agree well with the theoretical BER.

An algorithm is presented for selecting the k-th smallest element of a totally ordered (but not sorted) set of n elements, 1kn, in the case that a special-purpose sorter is used as a coprocessor. When the pipeline merge sorter is used as the special-purpose sorter, we analyze the comparison complexity of the algorithm for the given capacity of the sorter. The comparison complexity of the algorithm is 1.4167no(n), provided that the capacity of the sorter is 256 elements. The comparison complexity of the algorithm decreases as the capacity of the sorter increases.