Disentanglement of Prosody Representations via Diffusion Models and Scheduled Gradient Reversal.

Prosody plays a fundamental role in human speech and communication, facilitating intelligibility and conveying emotional and cognitive states. Extracting accurate prosodic information from speech is vital for building assistive technology, such as controllable speech synthesis, speaking style transfer, and speech emotion recognition (SER). However, it is challenging to disentangle speaker-independent prosody representations since prosodic attributes, such as intonation, excessively entangle with speaker-specific attributes, e.

Effectiveness and safety of vascular intervention plus lenvatinib versus vascular intervention alone for hepatocellular carcinoma patients with portal vein tumor thrombus: a retrospective comparative study.

Background: This study aimed to assess the effectiveness and safety of vascular intervention combined with lenvatinib versus vascular intervention alone in the treatment of advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) with portal vein tumor thrombus (PVTT), and to identify prognostic factors associated with the treatment outcomes.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective analysis of data from 92 patients with advanced HCC and PVTT who were treated between February 2016 and February 2023. Among them, 56 patients underwent vascular intervention alone (transarterial chemoembolization, TACE), while 36 patients received vascular intervention (TACE or hepatic arterial infusion chemotherapy [HAIC]) combined with lenvatinib.

Computational Modelling of Tone Perception Based on Direct Processing of Contours.

It has been widely assumed that in speech perception it is imperative to first detect a set of distinctive properties or features and then use them to recognize phonetic units like consonants, vowels, and tones. Those features can be auditory cues or articulatory gestures, or a combination of both. There have been no clear demonstrations of how exactly such a two-phase process would work in the perception of continuous speech, however.

Identification and functional analysis of bacteria in sclerotia of .

Background: is a fungus that parasitizes insects. Compounds from are valuable in medicine and functional food. There are many kinds of bacteria in the natural sclerotia of .

Comparing fundamental frequency of German vowels produced by German native speakers and Mandarin Chinese learners.

This study compared the f of 14 German vowels in monosyllabic words (/dVt/) embedded in carrier sentences produced by 30 native speakers and 30 Mandarin Chinese learners. Appropriate techniques were employed to robustly measure f values and reliably analyze f profiles. The results showed that Mandarin learners produced the vowels bearing sentence stress with significantly larger f ranges and steeper f slopes but comparable f mean and maximum in comparison to German natives.

An acoustic comparison of German tense and lax vowels produced by German native speakers and Mandarin Chinese learners.

This study analyzed the durational and spectral differences and their interaction in the production of seven German tense-lax vowel pairs between 30 German native speakers and 30 Mandarin learners of German. The results showed that Mandarin speakers differed significantly from the German speakers in producing the German tense-lax contrast. The general pattern was that Mandarin learners employed temporal features more strongly than spectral features to indicate the tense-lax contrast as compared to German speakers.