ISCA - International Speech
Communication Association


ISCApad Archive  »  2011  »  ISCApad #162  »  Resources

ISCApad #162

Wednesday, December 07, 2011 by Chris Wellekens

5 Resources
5-1 Books
5-1-1Robert M. Gray, Linear Predictive Coding and the Internet Protocol

Linear Predictive Coding and the Internet Protocol, by Robert M. Gray, a special edition hardback book from Foundations and Trends in Signal Processing (FnT SP). The book brings together two forthcoming issues of FnT SP, the first being a survey of LPC, the second a unique history of realtime digital speech on packet networks.

 

Volume 3, Issue 3                                                                                                                                                                                                 

A Survey of Linear Predictive Coding: Part 1 of LPC and the IP                                                                                                                                  

By Robert M. Gray (Stanford University)                                                                                                                                                                  

http://www.nowpublishers.com/product.aspx?product=SIG&doi=2000000029                                                                                                             

 

Volume 3, Issue  4

 

A History of Realtime Digital Speech on Packet Networks: Part 2 of LPC and the IP                                                                                                     

By Robert M. Gray (Stanford University)                                                                                                                                                                  

http://www.nowpublishers.com/product.aspx?product=SIG&doi=2000000036                                                                                                            

 

The links above will take you to the article abstracts.

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5-1-2M. Embarki and M. Ennaji, Modern Trends in Arabic Dialectology

Modern Trends in Arabic Dialectology,
M. Embarki & M. Ennaji (eds.), Trenton (USA): The Red Sea Press.

Contents
Introduction
Mohamed Embarki and Moha Ennaji
vii
Part I: Theoretical and Hi storical Perspectives
and Methods in Arabic Di alectology
Chapter 1 : Arabic Dialects: A Discussion
Janet C. E. Watson p. 3
Chapter 2 : The Emergence of Western Arabic: A Likely Consequence of Creolization
Federrico Corriente p. 39
Chapter 3 : Acoustic Cues for the Classification of Arabic Dialects
Mohamed Embarki p. 47
Chapter 4 : Variation and Attitudes:
A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the Qaaf
Maher Bahloul p. 69

Part II : Eastern Arabic Di alects
Chapter 5 : Arabic Bedouin Dialects and their Classification
Judith Rosenhouse p. 97
Chapter 6 : Evolution of Expressive Structures in Egyptian Arabic
Amr Helmy Ibrahim p. 121
Chapter 7 : ?adram? Arabic Lexicon
Abdullah Hassan Al-Saqqaf p. 139

Part III: Western Arabic Di alects
Chapter 8 : Dialectal Variation in Moroccan Arabic
Moha Ennaji p. 171
Chapter 9 : Formation and Evolution of Andalusi Arabic and its
Imprint on Modern Northern Morocco
Ángeles Vicente p. 185
Chapter 10 : The Phonetic Implementation of Falling Pitch Accents
in Dialectal Maltese: A Preliminary Study
of the Intonation of Gozitan ?ebbu?i
Alexandra Vella p. 211
Index p. 239



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5-1-3Gokhan Tur , R De Mori, Spoken Language Understanding: Systems for Extracting Semantic Information from Speech

Title: Spoken Language Understanding: Systems for Extracting Semantic Information from Speech

Editors: Gokhan Tur and Renato De Mori

Web: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470688246.html

Brief Description (please use as you see fit):

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is an emerging field in between speech and language processing, investigating human/ machine and human/ human communication by leveraging technologies from signal processing, pattern recognition, machine learning and artificial intelligence. SLU systems are designed to extract the meaning from speech utterances and its applications are vast, from voice search in mobile devices to meeting summarization, attracting interest from both commercial and academic sectors.

Both human/machine and human/human communications can benefit from the application of SLU, using differing tasks and approaches to better understand and utilize such communications. This book covers the state-of-the-art approaches for the most popular SLU tasks with chapters written by well-known researchers in the respective fields. Key features include:

Presents a fully integrated view of the two distinct disciplines of speech processing and language processing for SLU tasks.

Defines what is possible today for SLU as an enabling technology for enterprise (e.g., customer care centers or company meetings), and consumer (e.g., entertainment, mobile, car, robot, or smart environments) applications and outlines the key research areas.

Provides a unique source of distilled information on methods for computer modeling of semantic information in human/machine and human/human conversations.

This book can be successfully used for graduate courses in electronics engineering, computer science or computational linguistics. Moreover, technologists interested in processing spoken communications will find it a useful source of collated information of the topic drawn from the two distinct disciplines of speech processing and language processing under the new area of SLU.

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5-1-4Jody Kreiman, Diana Van Lancker Sidtis ,Foundations of Voice Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and Perception

Foundations of Voice Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and Perception
Jody Kreiman, Diana Van Lancker Sidtis
ISBN: 978-0-631-22297-2
Hardcover
512 pages
May 2011, Wiley-Blackwell

Foundations of Voice Studies provides a comprehensive description and analysis of the multifaceted role that voice quality plays in human existence.

•Offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on all facets of voice perception, illustrating why listeners hear what they do and how they reach conclusions based on voice quality
•Integrates voice literature from a multitude of sources and disciplines
•Supplemented with practical and approachable examples, including a companion website with sound files, available on publication at www.wiley.com/go/voicestudies
•Explores the choice of various voices in advertising and broadcasting, and voice perception in singing voices and forensic applications
•Provides a straightforward and thorough overview of vocal physiology and control


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5-1-5G. Nick Clements and Rachid Ridouane, Where Do Phonological Features Come From?

 

Where Do Phonological Features Come From?

Edited by G. Nick Clements and Rachid Ridouane

CNRS & Sorbonne-Nouvelle

This volume offers a timely reconsideration of the function, content, and origin of phonological features, in a set of papers that is theoretically diverse yet thematically strongly coherent. Most of the papers were originally presented at the International Conference 'Where Do Features Come From?' held at the Sorbonne University, Paris, October 4-5, 2007. Several invited papers are included as well. The articles discuss issues concerning the mental status of distinctive features, their role in speech production and perception, the relation they bear to measurable physical properties in the articulatory and acoustic/auditory domains, and their role in language development. Multiple disciplinary perspectives are explored, including those of general linguistics, phonetic and speech sciences, and language acquisition. The larger goal was to address current issues in feature theory and to take a step towards synthesizing recent advances in order to present a current 'state of the art' of the field.

 

 

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5-1-6Dorothea Kolossa and Reinhold Haeb-Umbach: Robust Speech Recognition of Uncertain or Missing Data
Title: Robust Speech Recognition of Uncertain or Missing Data
Editors: Dorothea Kolossa and Reinhold Haeb-Umbach
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2011
ISBN 978-3-642-21316-8
Link:
http://www.springer.com/engineering/signals/book/978-3-642-21316-8?detailsPage=authorsAndEditors

Automatic speech recognition suffers from a lack of robustness with
respect to noise, reverberation and interfering speech. The growing
field of speech recognition in the presence of missing or uncertain
input data seeks to ameliorate those problems by using not only a
preprocessed speech signal but also an estimate of its reliability to
selectively focus on those segments and features that are most reliable
for recognition. This book presents the state of the art in recognition
in the presence of uncertainty, offering examples that utilize
uncertainty information for noise robustness, reverberation robustness,
simultaneous recognition of multiple speech signals, and audiovisual
speech recognition.

The book is appropriate for scientists and researchers in the field of
speech recognition who will find an overview of the state of the art in
robust speech recognition, professionals working in speech recognition
who will find strategies for improving recognition results in various
conditions of mismatch, and lecturers of advanced courses on speech
processing or speech recognition who will find a reference and a
comprehensive introduction to the field. The book assumes an
understanding of the fundamentals of speech recognition using Hidden
Markov Models.
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5-1-7Mohamed Embarki et Christelle Dodane: La coarticulation

LA COARTICULATION

 

Mohamed Embarki et Christelle Dodane

Des indices à la représentation

La parole est faite de gestes articulatoires complexes qui se chevauchent dans l’espace et dans le temps. Ces chevauchements, conceptualisés par le terme coarticulation, n’épargnent aucun articulateur. Ils sont repérables dans les mouvements de la mâchoire, des lèvres, de la langue, du voile du palais et des cordesvocales. La coarticulation est aussi attendue par l’auditeur, les segments coarticulés sont mieux perçus. Elle intervient dans les processus cognitifs et linguistiques d’encodage et de décodage de la parole. Bien plus qu’un simple processus, la coarticulation est un domaine de recherche structuré avec des concepts et des modèles propres. Cet ouvrage collectif réunit des contributions inédites de chercheurs internationaux abordant lacoarticulation des points de vue moteur, acoustique, perceptif et linguistique. C’est le premier ouvrage publié en langue française sur cette question et le premier à l’explorer dans différentes langues.

 

 

Collection : Langue & Parole, L'Harmattan

ISBN : 978-2-296-55503-7 • 25 € • 260 pages

 

 

Mohamed Embarki

est maître de conférences-HDR en phonétique à l’université de Franche-Comté (Besançon) et membre du Laseldi (E.A. 2281). Ses travaux portent sur les aspects (co)articulatoires et acoustiques des parlers arabes modernes ainsi que sur leurs motivations sociophonétiques.

Christelle Dodane

est maître de conférences en phonétique à l’université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier 3) et elle est affiliée au laboratoire DIPRALANG (E.A. 739). Ses recherches portent sur la communication langagière chez le jeune enfant (12-36 mois) et notamment sur le rôle de la prosodie dans le passage du niveau pré-linguistique au niveau linguistique, dans la construction de la première syntaxe et dans le langage adressé à l’enfant.

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5-1-8Ben Gold, Nelson Morgan, Dan Ellis :Speech and Audio Signal Processing: Processing and Perception of Speech and Music [Digital]

Speech and Audio Signal Processing: Processing and Perception of Speech and Music [2nd edition]  Ben GoldNelson Morgan, Dan Ellis

Digital copy:  http://www.amazon.com/Speech-Audio-Signal-Processing-Perception/dp/product-description/1118142888

Hardcopy available: http://www.amazon.com/Speech-Audio-Signal-Processing-Perception/dp/0470195363/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319142964&sr=1-1

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5-2 Database
5-2-1Nominations for the Antonio Zampoli Prize (ELRA)

The ELRA Board has created a prize to honour the memory of its first President, Professor Antonio Zampolli, a pioneer and visionary scientist
who was internationally recognized in the field of computational linguistics and Human Language Technologies (HLT). He also contributed
much through the establishment of ELRA and the LREC conference.

To reflect Antonio Zampolli's specific interest in our field, the Prize will be awarded to individuals whose work lies within the areas of
Language Resources and Language Technology Evaluation with acknowledged contributions to their advancements.

The Prize will be awarded for the fifth time in May 2012 at the LREC 2012 conference in Istanbul (21-27 May 2012 ). Completed nominations should
be sent to the ELRA President Stelios Piperidis @ AntonioZampolli-Prize@elra.info no later than February 1st, 2012.
 

On behalf of the ELRA Board
Stelios Piperidis
President

Please visite ELRA web site for the Antonio Zampolli Prize Statutes and the nomination procedure:  http://www.elra.info/Antonio-Zampolli-Prize.html

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5-2-2ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update (2011-11)
***************************************************************** 
ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update 
***************************************************************** 

ELRA is happy to announce that 1 new Multimodal Resource is now available in its catalogue.

ELRA-S0323 European Parliament Interpretation Corpus (EPIC)
The EPIC corpus is a parallel corpus of European Parliament speeches and their corresponding simultaneous interpretations. This corpus includes source speeches in Italian, English and Spanish and interpreted speeches in all possible combinations and directions. It contains a total of 357 speeches (177,295 words). The corpus has been orthographically transcribed. Non-tagged transcripts in text format are also available.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1145 


For more information on the catalogue, please contact Valérie Mapelli mailto:mapelli@elda.org 

Visit our On-line Catalogue: http://catalog.elra.info
Visit the Universal Catalogue: http://universal.elra.info 
Archives of ELRA Language Resources Catalogue Updates: http://www.elra.info/LRs-Announcements.html
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5-2-3LDC Newsletter (November 2011)
In this newsletter:


Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Program

Invitation to Join for Membership Year (MY) 2012

Why become an LDC member?

LDC to close for Thanksgiving Break

New publications:


LDC2011S09
2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set

LDC2011V06
2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 2

LDC2011T13
Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Program


Applications are now being accepted through January 15, 2012 for the Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship program!  The LDC Data Scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost.   This program is open to students pursuing both undergraduate and graduate studies in an accredited college or university. LDC Data Scholarships are not restricted to any particular field of study; however, students must demonstrate a well-developed research agenda and a bona fide inability to pay. The selection process is highly competitive.  

The application consists of two parts: 

(1)  Data Use Proposal. Applicants must submit a proposal describing their intended use of the data. The proposal must contain the applicant's name, university, and field of study. The proposal should state which data the student plans to use and contain a description of their research project.  

Applicants should consult the LDC Corpus Catalog for a complete list of data distributed by LDC.  Due to certain restrictions, a handful of LDC corpora are restricted to members of the Consortium.  Applicants are advised to select a maximum of one to two data sets; students may apply for additional data sets during the following cycle once they have completed processing of the initial data sets and publish or present work in some juried venue.

(2) Letter of Support. Applicants must submit one letter of support from their thesis adviser or department chair. The letter must confirm that the department or university lacks the funding to pay the full Non-member Fee for the data and verify the student's need for data.

For further information on application materials and program rules, please visit the LDC Data Scholarship page.  

Students can email their applications to the LDC Data Scholarship program. Decisions will be sent by email from the same address.

The deadline for the Spring 2012 program cycle is January 15, 2012.



Invitation to join for Membership Year (MY) 2012


Membership Year (MY) 2012, our 20th Anniversary Year, is open for joining!  We would like to invite all current and previous members of LDC to renew their membership as well as welcome new organizations to join the consortium.    For MY2012, LDC is pleased to maintain membership fees at last year’s rates – membership fees will not increase.  Additionally, LDC will extend discounts on membership fees to members who keep their membership current and who join early in the year.

The details of our early renewal discounts for MY2012 are as follows: 

·         Organizations who joined for MY2011 will receive a 5% discount when renewing. This discount will apply throughout 2012, regardless of time of renewal. MY2011 members renewing before March 1, 2012 will receive an additional 5% discount, for a total 10% discount off the membership fee.

·         New members as well as organizations who did not join for MY2011, but who held membership in any of the previous MYs (1993-2010), will also be eligible for a 5% discount provided that they join/renew before March 1, 2012.

The following table provides exact pricing information. 

 

  
 MY2012 Fee 
 MY2012 Fee
with 5% Discount* 
 MY2012 Fee 
with 10% Discount**  
 
Not-for-Profit /US Government 
   
   
   
 
  
 Standard 
 US$2400 
 US$2280 
 US$2160 
 
  
 Subscription 
 US$3850 
 US$3658 
 US$3465 
 
For-Profit 
   
   
   
 
  
 Standard 
 US$24000 
 US$22800 
 US$21600 
 
  
 Subscription 
 US$27500 
 US$26125 
 US$24750 
 


*  For new members, MY2011 Members renewing for MY2012, and any previous year Member who renews before March 1, 2012

** For MY2011 Members renewing before March 1, 2012


Publications for MY2012 are still being planned; here are the working titles of data sets we intend to provide:

·         ARRAU 1.2 (Anaphor Resolution  and Underspecification)
 ·         TORGO Dysarthic Speech
 
·         Arabic Treebank BN (broadcast news)
 ·         GALE data – all phases and tasks
 
·         Digital Archive of Southern Speech
 ·         Chinese Dependency Treebank
 

  
In addition to receiving new publications, current year members of the LDC also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data at reduced costs; current year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.

This past year,  LDC members who joined early or kept their membership current saved almost US$70,000 collectively on membership fees.  Be sure to keep an eye on your mail - all previous and current LDC members will be sent an invitation to join letter and renewal invoice for MY2012.  Renew early for MY2012 to save today!



Why become an LDC member?
LDC is offering early renewal discounts on membership fees for Membership Year 2012 making now a good time to consider joining or renewing membership.   LDC membership has the following advantages:


•LDC membership provides cost-effective access to an extensive and growing catalog that spans 20 years and includes over 500 multilingual speech, text, and video resources. Even if your organization only needs a few datasets from a given membership year, membership is often the most economical way to obtain  current corpora. Additionally, the generous discounts that member organizations receive on older corpora reduce the cost of acquiring such datasets.
•All members enjoy unlimited use of LDC data within their organizations.  For universities, there is no difference in cost between a departmental membership and one that is university-wide. Departments can therefore combine resources and establish one LDC membership for use by the entire university community.  Likewise, for-profit members with multiple branches can maintain one membership for use by their entire organization.
For-profit organizations are reminded that an LDC membership is a pre-requisite for obtaining a commercial license to almost all LDC databases.  Non-member organizations, including non-member for-profit organizations, cannot use LDC data to develop or test products for commercialization, nor can they use LDC data in any commercial product or for any commercial purpose.  LDC data users should consult corpus-specific license agreements for limitations, including commercial restrictions, on the use of certain corpora. In the case of a small group of corpora, commercial licenses must be obtained separately from the owners of the data.


LDC to Close for Thanksgiving Break


LDC would like to inform our customers that we will be closed on Thursday, November 24, 2011 and Friday, November 25, 2011 in observance of the US Thanksgiving Holiday.  Our offices will reopen on Monday, November 28, 2011.

 

New Publications

 

(1) 2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set was developed by LDC and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). It contains 595 hours of conversational telephone speech in English, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Russian, Thai and Urdu and associated English transcripts used as training data in the NIST-sponsored 2006 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). The ongoing series of SRE yearly evaluations conducted by NIST are intended to be of interest to researchers working on the general problem of text independent speaker recognition. 

The task of the 2006 SRE evaluation was speaker detection, that is, to determine whether a specified speaker is speaking during a given segment of conversational telephone speech. The task was divided into 15 distinct and separate tests involving one of five training conditions and one of four test conditions. Further information about the test conditions and additional documentation is available at the NIST web site for the 2006 SRE and within the 2006 SRE Evaluation Plan.

The speech data in this release was collected by LDC as part of the Mixer project, in particular Mixer Phases 1, 2 and 3. The Mixer project supports the development of robust speaker recognition technology by providing carefully collected and audited speech from a large pool of speakers recorded simultaneously across numerous microphones and in different communicative situations and/or in multiple languages. The data is mostly English speech, but includes some speech in the above languages

The telephone speech segments are multi-channel data collected simultaneously from a number of auxiliary microphones. The files are organized into three types: two-channel excerpts of approximately 10 seconds, two-channel conversations of approximately 5 minutes and summed-channel conversations also of approximately 5 minutes.

English language transcripts in .ctm format were produced using an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system.

2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set is distributed on seven DVD-ROM.

2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$2000.


*



(2) 2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 2 was developed by researchers at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida (USF), Tampa, Florida and the Multimodal Information Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It contains approximately twenty hours of meeting room video data collected in 2005 and 2006 and annotated for the VACE (Video Analysis and Content Extraction) 2006 face and person tracking tasks.

The VACE program was established to develop novel algorithms for automatic video content extraction, multi-modal fusion, and event understanding. During VACE Phases I and II, the program made significant progress in the automated detection and tracking of moving objects including faces, hands, people, vehicles and text in four primary video domains: broadcast news, meetings, street surveillance, and unmanned aerial vehicle motion imagery. Initial results were also obtained on automatic analysis of human activities and understanding of video sequences. 

Three performance evaluations were conducted under the auspices of the VACE program between 2004 and 2007. In 2006, the VACE program and the European Union's Computers in the Human Interaction Loop (CHIL) collaborated to hold the Classification of Events, Activities and Relationships (CLEAR) Evaluation. This was an international effort to evaluate systems designed to analyze people, their identities, activities, interactions and relationships in human-human interaction scenarios, as well as related scenarios. The VACE program contributed the evaluation infrastructure (e.g., data, scoring, tools) for a specific set of tasks, and the CHIL consortium, coordinated by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, contributed a separate set of evaluation infrastructure. To the extent possible, the VACE and CHIL programs harmonized their evaluation protocols and metrics.

The meeting room data used for the 2006 test set was collected by the following sites in 2005 and 2006: Carnegie Mellon University (USA), University of Edinburgh (Scotland), IDIAP Research Institute (Switzerland), NIST (USA), Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (Netherlands) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (USA). 

2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 2 is distributed on ten DVD-ROM.

2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$2500.


*


(3) Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition was produced by LDC. It is a comprehensive archive of newswire text data that has been acquired from Chinese news sources by LDC at the University of Pennsylvania. Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition includes all of the content of the fourth edition of Chinese Gigaword (LDC2009T27) plus new data covering the period from January 2009 through December 2010.

Eight distinct sources of Chinese newswire are represented here:

•·         Agence France Presse(afp_cmn)
•·         Central News Agency, Taiwan(cna_cmn)
•·         Central News Service(cns_cmn)
•·         Guangming Daily(gmw_cmn)
•·         People's Daily(pda_cmn)
•·         People's Liberation Army Daily(pla_cmn)
•·         Xinhua News Agency(xin_cmn)
•·         Zaobao Newspaper(zbn_cmn)
The seven-letter codes in the parentheses above are used for the directory names and data files for each source.  Articles covering the period from January 2009 through December 2010 have been added to the Agence France Presse, Central News Agency (CNA), Central News Service, Guangming Daily, People's Liberation Army Daily and Xinhua News Agency data sets. The data from People's Daily covers the period from late June 2009 through December 2010. No new data from Zaobao has been added. 

Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition is distributed on one DVD-ROM.

2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$6000.
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5-2-4Speechocean December 2011 update

Speechocean - Language Resource Catalogue - New Released (2011-10)
Speechocean, as a global provider of language resources and data services, has more than 200 large-scale databases available in 80+ languages and accents covering the fields of Text to Speech, Automatic Speech Recognition, Text, Machine Translation, Web Search, Videos, Images etc.
Speechocean is glad to announce that more Speech Resources has been released:
Canadian French Speech Recognition Database - Sentences (Desktop) -- 200 speakers
This Canadian French speech recognition database was collected by Speechocean’s project team in Canada. It contains the voices of 200 different native speakers who were demographic balanced according age distribution (mainly 16 – 30, 31 – 45, 46 – 60), gender (50±5% Males, 50±5% Females) and regional accents. A script pool with a total of 20,000 simple sentences was phonetically designed for both training and testing of speech recognizers. Each speaker has recorded 300 sentences which were randomly selected from the script pool. All speakers have been recorded in a quiet office room through two professional microphones. Each prompted utterance is stored in a separate file and each signal file is accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.
A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic SAMPA transcription is also included.
For more information, please see the technical document at the following link:
http://www.speechocean.com/en-ASR-Corpora/616.html


UK English Speech Recognition Database ---- Sentences (Desktop)-200 Speakers
This UK English desktop speech recognition database was collected by Speechocean’s project team in UK. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD) which contains the database collections for 30 languages presently.
It contains the voices of 200 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16 – 30,31 – 45,46 – 60), gender (106 males, 94 females) and regional accents (for the details, please see the technical document).The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognizers. Each speaker has been recorded in a quiet office environment and 300 phonetically rich sentences were randomly selected from a pool of sentences specially designed.
The speech data are stored as sequences of 48.1 kHz, 16 bit and uncompressed. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included. The pure recording hours are 189.1. And the phoneme labelling of 6843 sentences (100034 words) which were chosen from 24 speakers were manually made.
For more information, please see the technical document at the following link:
http://www.speechocean.com/en-ASR-Corpora/792.html

UK TTS Speech database (Female)
The UK English Speech Corpus consists in one native UK Female professional broadcaster (Female, 35 years old) recorded in a studio with high SNR (>35dB) over two channels (AKG C4000B microphone and Electroglottography (EGG) sensor).
The Corpus includes the following sub-corpora:
1. Sentence sub-corpus: including 3000 short sentences (7~12 words) and 2000 sentences with normal length (13~20 words). Considering all kinds of linguistic phenomena, all sentences were extracted from the daily articles in England, such as national and international news, papers about life, travel, and so on. The sentences with political/religious/obscene/pornographic words which might lead to negative emotions were carefully excluded.
2. Emotional sub-corpus: including 100 exclamatory sentences and 100 interrogative sentences which can be used for emotional TTS study;
3. Digit sub-corpus: including many kinds of digits data, such as isolated digit, connected digits with blocks, natural and ordinal number readings;
4. Expression sub-corpus: consists of general expressions, such as date, time, money and measure expression;
5. Spell sub-corpus: including characters in alphabet, Greek characters and general abbreviations; All reading prompts are manually revised and prosody annotations were made according to real speech.
All speech data are segmented and labeled on phone level. Pronunciation lexicon and pitch extract from EEG can also be provided based on demands.
For more information, please see the technical document at the following link:
http://www.speechocean.com/en-TTS-Corpora/799.html

US TTS speech database (Female)
The US English Speech Corpus consists in one native US Female professional broadcaster (Female, 36 years old) recorded in a studio with high SNR (>35dB) over two channels (AKG C4000B microphone and Electroglottography (EGG) sensor).
The Corpus includes the following sub-corpora:
1. Sentence sub-corpus: including 3000 short sentences (7~12 words) and 2000 sentences with normal length (13~20 words). Considering all kinds of linguistic phenomena, all sentences were extracted from the daily articles in the Usa, such as national and international news, papers about life, travel, and so on. The sentences with political/religious/obscene/pornographic words which might lead to negative emotions were carefully excluded.
2. Emotional sub-corpus: including 100 exclamatory sentences and 100 interrogative sentences which can be used for emotional TTS study;
3. Digit sub-corpus: including many kinds of digits data, such as isolated digit, connected digits with blocks, natural and ordinal number readings;
4. Expression sub-corpus: consists of general expressions, such as date, time, money and measure expression;
5. Spell sub-corpus: including characters in alphabet, Greek characters and general abbreviations; All reading prompts are manually revised and prosody annotations were made according to real speech.
All speech data are segmented and labeled on phone level. Pronunciation lexicon and pitch extract from EEG can also be provided based on demands.

Italian TTS speech database (Female)
The Italian Speech Corpus consists in one native Italian Female professional broadcaster (Female, 26 years old) recorded in a studio with high SNR (>35dB) over two channels (AKG C4000B microphone and Electroglottography (EGG) sensor).
The Corpus includes the following sub-corpora:
1. Sentence sub-corpus: including 3000 short sentences (7~12 words) and 2000 sentences with normal length (13~20 words). Considering all kinds of linguistic phenomena, all sentences were extracted from the daily articles in Italy, such as national and international news, papers about life, travel, and so on. The sentences with political/religious/obscene/pornographic words which might lead to negative emotions were carefully excluded.
2. Emotional sub-corpus: including 100 exclamatory sentences and 100 interrogative sentences which can be used for emotional TTS study;
3. Digit sub-corpus: including many kinds of digits data, such as isolated digit, connected digits with blocks, natural and ordinal number readings;
4. Expression sub-corpus: consists of general expressions, such as date, time, money and measure expression;
5. Spell sub-corpus: including characters in alphabet, Greek characters and general abbreviations; All reading prompts are manually revised and prosody annotations were made according to real speech.
All speech data are segmented and labeled on phone level. Pronunciation lexicon and pitch extract from EEG can also be provided based on demands.

For more information about our Database and Services please visit our website www.Speechocen.com or visit our on-line Catalogue at http://www.speechocean.com/en-Product-Catalogue/Index.html
If you have any inquiry regarding our databases and service please feel free to contact us:
Xianfeng Cheng mailto: Chengxianfeng@speechocean.com
Marta Gherardi mailto: Marta@speechocean.com

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5-3 Software
5-3-1Matlab toolbox for glottal analysis

I am pleased to announce you that we made a Matlab toolbox for glottal analysis now available on the web at:

 

http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/~drugman/Toolbox/

 

This toolbox includes the following modules:

 

- Pitch and voiced-unvoiced decision estimation

- Speech polarity detection

- Glottal Closure Instant determination

- Glottal flow estimation

 

By the way, I am also glad to send you my PhD thesis entitled “Glottal Analysis and its Applications”:

http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/~drugman/files/DrugmanPhDThesis.pdf

 

where you will find applications in speech synthesis, speaker recognition, voice pathology detection, and expressive speech analysis.

 

Hoping that this might be useful to you, and to see you soon,

 

Thomas Drugman

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5-3-2ROCme!: a free tool for audio corpora recording and management

ROCme!: nouveau logiciel gratuit pour l'enregistrement et la gestion de corpus audio.

Le logiciel ROCme! permet une gestion rationalisée, autonome et dématérialisée de l’enregistrement de corpus lus.

Caractéristiques clés :
- gratuit
- compatible Windows et Mac
- interface paramétrable pour le recueil de métadonnées sur les locuteurs
- le locuteur fait défiler les phrases à l'écran et les enregistre de façon autonome
- format audio paramétrable

Téléchargeable à cette adresse :
www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/rocme

 
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