Articles

AbstractThe goal of the LILA project was the collection of speech databases over cellular telephone networks of five languages in three Asian countries. Three languages were recorded in India: Hindi by first language speakers, Hindi by second language speakers and Indian English. Furthermore, Mandarin was recorded in China and Korean …...

AbstractThis paper describes a new speech corpus, STC-TIMIT, and discusses the process of design, development and its distribution through LDC. The STC-TIMIT corpus is derived from the widely used TIMIT corpus by sending it through a real and single telephone channel. TIMIT is phonetically balanced, covers the dialectal diversity in …...

AbstractA speech and noise corpus dealing with the extreme conditions of the motorcycle environment is developed within the MoveOn project. Speech utterances in British English are recorded and processed approaching the issue of command and control and template driven dialog systems on the motorcycle. The major part of the corpus …...

AbstractThe extraction of flat concepts out of a given word sequence is usually one of the first steps in building a spoken language understanding (SLU) or dialogue system. This paper explores five different modelling approaches for this task and presents results on a French state-of-the-art corpus, MEDIA. Additionally, two log-linear …...

AbstractIn this paper we present an active approach to annotate with lexical and semantic labels an Italian corpus of conversational human-human and Wizard-of-Oz dialogues. This procedure consists in the use of a machine learner to assist human annotators in the labeling task. The computer assisted process engages human annotators to …...

AbstractWe present recent work in the area of Cross-Domain Dialogue Act (DA) tagging. We have previously reported on the use of a simple dialogue act classifier based on purely intra-utterance features - principally involving word n-gram cue phrases automatically generated from a training corpus. Such a classifier performs surprisingly well, …...

AbstractThis paper introduces a knowledge representation formalism used for annotation of the French MEDIA dialogue corpus in terms of high level semantic structures. The semantic annotation, worked out according to the Berkeley FrameNet paradigm, is incremental and partially automated. We describe an automatic interpretation process for composing semantic structures from …...

AbstractIn this paper, quantitative analyses of the delay in Japanese-to-English (J-E) and English-to-Japanese (E-J) interpretations are described. The Simultaneous Interpretation Database of Nagoya University (SIDB) was used for the analyses. Beginning time and end time of each word were provided to the corpus using HMM-based phoneme segmentation, and the time …...

AbstractWe present an approach for the cross-lingual induction of speech recognition grammars that separates the task of translation from the task of grammar generation. The source speech recognition grammar is used to generate phrases, which are translated by a common translation service. The target recognition grammar is induced by using …...

AbstractWe describe recent work on MedSLT, a medium-vocabulary interlingua-based medical speech translation system, focussing on issues that arise when handling languages of which the grammar engineer has little or no knowledge. We show how we can systematically create and maintain multiple forms of grammars, lexica and interlingual representations, with some …...

AbstractA new approach to handle unknown words in machine translation is presented. The basic idea is to find definitions for the unknown words on the source language side and translate those definitions instead. Only monolingual resources are required, which generally offer a broader coverage than bilingual resources and are available …...

AbstractRegulus is an Open Source platform that supports construction of rule-based medium-vocabulary spoken dialogue applications. It has already been used to build several substantial speech-enabled applications, including NASA’s Clarissa procedure navigator and Geneva University’s MedSLT medical speech translator. System like these would be far more useful if they were available …...

AbstractLC-STAR II is a follow-up project of the EU funded project LC-STAR (Lexica and Corpora for Speech-to-Speech Translation Components, IST-2001-32216). LC-STAR II develops large lexica containing information for speech processing in ten languages targeting especially automatic speech recognition and text to speech synthesis but also other applications like speech-to-speech translation …...

AbstractThis paper presents MISTRAL, an open source statistical machine translation decoder dedicated to spoken language translation. While typical machine translation systems take a written text as input, MISTRAL translates word lattices produced by automatic speech recognition systems. The lattices are translated in two passes using a phrase-based model. Our experiments …...

AbstractThe paper deals with the process of designing a phonetically and prosodically rich speech corpus for unit selection speech synthesis. The attention is given mainly to the recording and verification stage of the process. In order to ensure as high quality and consistency of the recordings as possible, a special …...

AbstractIn this paper we share our experience and describe the methodologies that we have used in designing and recording large speech databases for applications requiring speech synthesis. Given the growing demand for customized and domain specific voices for use in corpus based synthesis systems, we believe that good practices should …...

AbstractTexts generated by automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have some specificities, related to the idiosyncrasies of oral productions or the principles of ASR systems, that make them more difficult to exploit than more conventional natural language written texts. This paper aims at studying the interest of morphosyntactic information as a …...

AbstractThe consortium ECESS (European Center of Excellence for Speech Synthesis) has set up a framework for evaluation of software modules and tools relevant for speech synthesis. Till now two lines of evaluation campaigns have been established: (1) Evaluation of the ECESS TTS modules (text processing, prosody, acoustic synthesis). (2) Evaluation …...

AbstractThe production of rich multilingual speech corpus resources on a large scale is a requirement for many linguistic, phonetic and technological tasks, in both research and application domains. It is also time-consuming and therefore expensive. The human component in the resource creation process is also prone to inconsistencies, a situation …...

AbstractLarge vocabulary automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies perform well in known, controlled contexts. However recognition of proper nouns is commonly considered as a difficult task. Accurate phonetic transcription of a proper noun is difficult to obtain, although it can be one of the most important resources for a recognition system. …...