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Dr. Joao Paulo Cabral

(ADAPT)
(Computer Science)
      
Profile Photo

Dr. Joao Paulo Cabral

(ADAPT)

 cabralj@tcd.ie

 

(Computer Science)


João Cabral is a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, as part of the ADAPT Centre. He received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Lisbon, Portugal, in Electrical and Computer Engineering, in 2003 and 2006 respectively. He was awarded a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Informatics from the University of Edinburgh, U.K., in 2010, funded by a European Commission Marie Curie Fellowship, under the Early Stage Research Training (E.S.T) scheme. Before joining Trinity College Dublin in 2013, he also worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University College Dublin, as part of the CNGL research centre, from 2010.
  Audio Signal Processing   Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)   deep learning   MACHINE LEARNING   Natural Language Processing   Speech Emotions   Speech synthesis   statistical parametric speech synthesis   VOICE QUALITY   VOICE SOURCE   voice transformation
Project Title
 Expressive Speech Synthesis: VoiceTune
From
2020
To
2022
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
Programme
Commercialisation Fund
Project Title
 CogSIS - Cognitive Effects of Speech Interface Synthesis
From
2017
To
2018
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
Project Title
 Production, Perception and Cognition in the interception between speech and singing
From
2016
To
2017
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)

Language Skill Reading Skill Writing Skill Speaking
English Fluent Fluent Fluent
French Medium Medium Basic
Portuguese Fluent Fluent Fluent
Spanish Medium Basic Basic
Details Date From Date To
Member of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) 2005
Member of the Marie Curie Fellows Association (MCFA) 2006
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, 2022, Journal Article, IN_PRESS  URL
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 - 6, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
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 - 23, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
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 - 35, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  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, 2019, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
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, 2019, Journal Article, PUBLISHED
João P. Cabral, Estimation of the Asymmetry Parameter of the Glottal Flow Waveform Using the Electroglottographic Signal, INTERSPEECH 2018, Hyderabad, India, 2-6 Septmeber, 2018, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED
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 - 546, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  TARA - Full Text  URL
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, 2018, Conference Paper, PRESENTED  TARA - Full Text  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 - 233, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  TARA - Full Text  DOI  URL
  

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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, 2011, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED

  


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.