Institute of Problems of Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Secretary

Maksym Vakulenko

About speaker:
I efficiently apply both my born skills (perfect ear, analytical thinking, great capacity of work, flexibility, etc.) and a strong background in physics (PhD) in the fields of computational and applied linguistics.

These prerequisites helped me to proceed further than my colleagues:

• In phonetics, I managed to separate speech sound characteristics resulting from the tube and Helmholtz resonances that allowed me to find invariant (speaker-independent) acoustic characteristics of the Ukrainian and English speech sounds, which was not done before. Applicable for phonetics and for enhancing the performance of modern speech recognition tools. Additional tricks reflecting speech wave acoustics will shorten training time and will need much smaller datasets.

• In terminology, we put forward a concept of investigation methods of terminology that allow one to treat terminology as a full-fledged science.

• In terminography, we wrote the Ukrainian-English-Russian ""Explanatory dictionary on physics"" which is a dictionary of the encyclopedic type and is the only dictionary of this kind in Ukraine.

• In quantitative linguistics, I put forward an analytical approach yielding exact expressions for semantic distances between words.

Presentation topic:
Positional variations of the location of Ukrainian vowel formants

More about presentation:
The variations in the location of formants of Ukrainian vowels caused by different phonetic contexts are analyzed. The corresponding invariant acoustic parameters being the ratios between frequencies of the formants caused by the tube resonance are determined. It is shown that different phonetic environments cause different formant configurations in vowels which is a case of sound assimilation. In particular, high vowels make the other vowels in the phonetic word move higher, and the front ones make the back ones move forward. Such formant shifts are more pronounced in unstressed positions and especially in a coda.

Key words: Ukrainian vowels, formant frequency ratio, invariant acoustic parameters, formant shift, sound assimilation.