Abstract

ion, for imposing continuity between models of adjacent speech segments, and learning rate adaptation, for improving back-propagation training, are discussed. For synthesising real speech utterances, an audio tape demonstrates that ARX models produce the highest quality synthetic speech and that the quality is maintained when pitch modifications are applied. The second part of the dissertation studies the operation of recurrent neural networks in classifying patterns of correlated feature vectors. Such patterns are typical of speech classification tasks. The operation of a hidden node with a recurrent connection is explained in terms of a decision boundary which changes position in feature space. The feedback is shown to delay switching from one class to another and to smooth output decisions for sequences of feature vectors from the same class. For networks trained with constant class targets, a sequence of feature vectors from the same class tends to drive the operation of hidden nod

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