Emmanuel Vincent (Editor), Tuomas Virtanen (Editor), Sharon Gannot (Editor),

Audio Source Separation and Speech Enhancement:

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Audio+Source+Separation+and+Speech+Enhancement-p-9781119279891

ISBN: 978-1-119-27989-1

October 2018

504 pages

This 500-page book provides a unifying view of source separation and enhancement,
including but not limited to array processing, matrix factorization, and deep learning
based methods, and speech and music applications, with consistent notation and
terminology across all chapters.

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Jen-Tzung Chien, 'Source Separation and Machine Learning', Academic Press

Source Separation and Machine Learning presents the fundamentals in adaptive learning
algorithms for Blind Source Separation (BSS) and emphasizes the importance of machine
learning perspectives. It illustrates how BSS problems are tackled through adaptive
learning algorithms and model-based approaches using the latest information on mixture
signals to build a BSS model that is seen as a statistical model for a whole system.
Looking at different models, including independent component analysis (ICA), nonnegative
matrix factorization (NMF), nonnegative tensor factorization (NTF), and deep neural
network (DNN), the book addresses how they have evolved to deal with multichannel and
singlechannel source separation.

Key features:
? Emphasizes the modern model-based Blind Source Separation (BSS) which closely connects
the latest research topics of BSS and Machine Learning
? Includes coverage of Bayesian learning, sparse learning, online learning,
discriminative learning and deep learning
? Presents a number of case studies of model-based BSS, using a variety of learning
algorithms that provide solutions for the construction of BSS systems

https://www.elsevier.com/books/source-separation-and-machine-learning/chien/978-0-12-804566-4

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Nous sommes heureux de vous annoncer la parution d'un recueil validé par un comité de lecture et consacré aux méthodes de recherche en prosodie. Cet ouvrage est intitulé « Methods in prosody: A Romance language perspective ».

Il est publié par Language Science Press, une maison d’édition open access. Le livre peut-être téléchargé gratuitement en cliquant sur le lien suivant :

http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/183

La table des matières est la suivante :

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

Introduction
Ingo Feldhausen, Jan Fliessbach & Maria del Mar Vanrell                                                                   iii

Foreword
Pilar Prieto                                                                                                                                              vii

I Large corpora and spontaneous speech

1) Using large corpora and computational tools to describe prosody: An
exciting challenge for the future with some (important) pending problems to solve
Juan María Garrido Almiñana                                                                                                                  3

2) Intonation of pronominal subjects in Porteño Spanish: Analysis of 
spontaneous speech
Andrea Pešková                                                                                                                                     45

II Approaches to prosodic analysis

3) Multimodal analyses of audio-visual information: Some methods and
issues in prosody research
Barbara Gili Fivela                                                                                                                                 83

4) The realizational coefficient: Devising a method for empirically
determining prominent positions in Conchucos Quechua
Timo Buchholz & Uli Reich                                                                                                                 123

5) On the role of prosody in disambiguating wh-exclamatives and
wh-interrogatives in Cosenza Italian
Olga Kellert, Daniele Panizza & Caterina Petrone                                                                               165

III Elicitation methods

6) The Discourse Completion Task in Romance prosody research: Status
quo and outlook
Maria del Mar Vanrell, Ingo Feldhausen & Lluïsa Astruc                                                                    191

7) Describing the intonation of speech acts in Brazilian Portuguese:
Methodological aspects
João Antônio de Moraes & Albert Rilliard                                                                                           229

Indexes                                                                                                                                                  263

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

N'hésitez pas à diffuser la parution de cet ouvrage auprès de vos collègues qui pourraient s'y intéresser.

Bien cordialement,

Ingo Feldhausen
(Co-coordinateur d'ouvrage)

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Prosodic Patterns in English Conversation

Nigel G. Ward, Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso

Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Spoken language is more than words: it includes the prosodic features and patterns that speakers use, subconsciously, to frame meanings and achieve interactional goals. Thanks to the application of simple processing techniques to spoken dialog corpora, this book goes beyond intonation to describe how pitch, timing, intensity and voicing properties combine to form meaningful temporal configurations: prosodic constructions. Combining new findings with hitherto-scattered observations from diverse research traditions, this book enumerates twenty of the principal prosodic constructions of English.  

http://www.cambridge.org/ward/

nigel@utep.edu    http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/   

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Voice Quality

The Laryngeal Articulator Model

Hardback 978-1-108-49842-5

John H. Esling, University of Victoria, British Columbia

Scott R. Moisik, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Allison Benner, University of Victoria, British Columbia

Lise Crevier-Buchman, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris

The first description of voice quality production in forty years, this book

provides a new framework for its study: The Laryngeal Articulator Model.

Informed by instrumental examinations of the laryngeal articulatory

mechanism, it revises our understanding of articulatory postures to explain

the actions, vibrations and resonances generated in the epilarynx and

pharynx. It focuses on the long-term auditory-articulatory component of

accent in the languages of the world, explaining how voice quality relates to

segmental and syllabic sounds. Phonetic illustrations of phonation types

and of laryngeal and oral vocal tract articulatory postures are provided.

Extensive video and audio material is available on a companion website.

The book presents computational simulations, the laryngeal and voice

quality foundations of infant speech acquisition, speech/voice disorders and

surgeries that entail compensatory laryngeal articulator adjustment, and an

exploration of the role of voice quality in sound change and of the larynx in

the evolution of speech.

1. Voice and voice quality; 2. Voice quality classification; 3. Instrumental case

studies and computational simulations of voice quality; 4. Linguistic, paralinguistic

and extralinguistic illustrations of voice quality; 5. Phonological implications of

voice quality theory; 6. Infant acquisition of speech and voice quality; 7. Clinical

illustrations of voice quality; 8. Laryngeal articulation and voice quality in sound

change, language ontogeny.

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Albert di Cristo, les langues naturelles.
Première partie : La structure informationnelle et ses déterminants, 2019, 548 p. 

https://hal-amu.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02149640

Cet ouvrage constitue la première partie d?un vaste travail dédié à l?étude des façons dont les langues naturelles conditionnent l?information et au rôle que joue la prosodie dans l?expression de ces conditionnements. Cette première partie se propose d?analyser, sous ses divers aspects (principalement d'ordre épistémologiques), la notion de structure informationnelle, notamment dans ses relations avec la grammaire et d?examiner, dans le détail, les déterminants qui forment l?armature de cette structure. Dans cette perspective, les discussions portent, outre sur les notions de thème, de topique et de « given », sur celles de focus, de focalisation et de contraste, qui font l?objet d?analyses approfondies. Les discussions s?attachent à appréhender ces notions, à la fois dans l?optique de leurs propriétés formelles, de leur fonctionnalité et des significations qu?elles contribuent à délivrer. Un chapitre entier de cette première partie est consacré à l?étude du questionnement et à la manière dont l?organisation de l?information est gérée dans l?exercice de cette activité. L?ouvrage est doté d?une bibliographie qui comporte plus de deux mille références.

Cet ouvrage sera complété par une 2ème partie, en cours de rédaction, qui traitera essentiellement de la prosodie et de son rôle dans les conditionnements de l'information.
 

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Benjamin Weiss (2020): 'Talker Quality in Human and Machine Interaction - Modeling the Listener’s Perspective in Passive and Interactive Scenarios'. T-Labs Series in Telecommunication Services. Springer Nature, Cham.

In this book, the background, state of research, and own contributions to the assessment and prediction of talker quality that is constituted in voice perception and in dialog are presented. Starting from theories and empirical findings from human interaction, major results and approaches are transferred to the domain of human-computer interaction. The main subject of this book is to contribute to the evaluation of spoken interaction in both humans and between human and computer, and in particular to the quality subsequently attributed to the speaking system or person, based on the listening and interactive experience.

https://rd.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-22769-2

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Dear all,

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In this newsletter:
LDC adds DOI Identifier to its Language Resources
Fall 2020 LDC Data Scholarship Program

New Publications:
LORELEI Vietnamese Representative Language Pack
DEFT Chinese Light and Rich ERE Annotation
CALLFRIEND American English – Southern Dialect Second Edition

LDC adds DOI Identifier to its Language Resources
As of July 2020, LDC’s language resources include a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), an internationally recognized identification standard for online digital material. DOIs are alpha numeric strings that correspond to URLs and metadata for specified resources. They are expressed as links that resolve to the object’s online location. For example, the DOI for Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English LDC2020T16 is https://doi.org/10.35111/4hzx-5483, which leads users to the LDC catalog entry for this data set. To facilitate its assignment and administration of DOIs, LDC has joined DataCite, a global DOI provider for research data. (DOIs for resources released before July 2020 will be assigned through a process expected to be completed shortly.) LDC data sets now have four persistent identifiers: a unique LDC number, ISBN, ISLRN, and DOI. Adding DOIs is consistent with our aim to follow best practices for archiving and curating digital resources, evidenced by the CoreTrustSeal certification which recognizes the LDC Catalog as a trustworthy data repository.

Fall 2020 LDC Data Scholarship Program
Student applications for the Fall 2020 LDC Data Scholarship program are being accepted now through September 15, 2020. This scholarship program provides eligible students with no-cost access to LDC data. Students must complete an application consisting of a data use proposal and letter of support from their advisor.

For application requirements and program rules, visit the LDC Data Scholarship page.

New publications:
(1) LORELEI Vietnamese Representative Language Pack consists of Vietnamese monolingual text, Vietnamese-English parallel text, annotations, supplemental resources, and related software tools developed by LDC for the DARPA LORELEI program.

The LORELEI (Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents) program was concerned with building human language technology for low resource languages in the context of emergent situations like natural disasters or disease outbreaks. Linguistic resources for LORELEI include Representative Language Packs and Incident Language Packs for over two dozen low resource languages, comprising data, annotations, basic natural language processing tools, lexicons, and grammatical resources. Representative languages were selected to provide broad typological coverage, while incident languages were selected to evaluate system performance on a language whose identity was disclosed at the start of the evaluation.

Data was collected in the following genres: discussion forum, news, reference, social network, and weblogs. Data volumes are as follows:

• Over 172 million words of Vietnamese monolingual text, approximately 325,000 words of which were translated into English
• 106,000 Vietnamese words translated from English data
• 1.9 million words of found parallel text

Approximately 75,000 words were annotated for named entities and up to 25,000 words contain additional annotation, including situation frames (identifying entities, needs, and issues) and entity linking and detection.

LORELEI Vietnamese Representative Language Pack is distributed via web download.

2020 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2020 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a $250.

                                                                                                                                                                               *

(2) DEFT Chinese Light and Rich ERE Annotation contains Chinese discussion forum web text annotated for entities, relations, and events (ERE) using the ERE Light and ERE Rich annotations schemas developed by LDC. Light ERE annotation labels entity mentions for the target set of ERE types between and among those entities, including coreference. Rich ERE annotation expands types and tagging for ERE annotation tasks and replaces event coreference with event hopper annotation. All files in this release (157) were annotated following Light ERE guidelines; a subset (149) were also labeled with Rich ERE annotation. 

DARPA’s Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) program aimed to address remaining capability gaps in state-of-the-art natural language processing technologies related to inference, causal relationships, and anomaly detection. LDC supported the DEFT program by collecting, creating, and annotating a variety of data sources.

DEFT Chinese Light and Rich ERE Annotation is distributed via web download.

2020 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2020 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for $2000.

                                                                                                                                                                                *

(3) CALLFRIEND American English – Southern Dialect Second Edition was developed by LDC and consists of approximately 26 hours of unscripted telephone conversations between native speakers of Southern dialects of American English. This second edition updates the audio files to wav format, simplifies the directory structure, and adds documentation and metadata. The first edition is available as CALLFRIEND American English-Southern Dialect (LDC96S47).

The CALLFRIEND collection was conducted by LDC in support of language identification technology development. All data in this release was collected before July 1997. Participants could speak with a person of their choice on any topic; most called family members and friends. All calls originated in North America. The recorded conversations last up to 30 minutes.

CALLFRIEND American English – Southern Dialect Second Edition is distributed via web download.

2020 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2020 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for $1000.

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Forensic database of voice recordings of 500+ Australian English speakers

We are pleased to announce that the forensic database of voice recordings of 500+ Australian English speakers is now published.

The database was collected by the Forensic Voice Comparison Laboratory, School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications, University of New South Wales as part of the Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project on making demonstrably valid and reliable forensic voice comparison a practical everyday reality in Australia. The project was conducted in partnership with: Australian Federal Police,  New South Wales Police,  Queensland Police, National Institute of Forensic Sciences, Australasian Speech Sciences and Technology Association, Guardia Civil, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

The database includes multiple non-contemporaneous recordings of most speakers. Each speaker is recorded in three different speaking styles representative of some common styles found in forensic casework. Recordings are recorded under high-quality conditions and extraneous noises and crosstalk have been manually removed. The high-quality audio can be processed to reflect recording conditions found in forensic casework.

The database can be accessed at: http://databases.forensic-voice-comparison.net/

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Audio and Electroglottographic speech recordings from several languages

We are happy to announce the public availability of speech recordings made as part of the UCLA project 'Production and Perception of Linguistic Voice Quality'.

http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/voiceproject/voice.html

Audio and EGG recordings are available for Bo, Gujarati, Hmong, Mandarin, Black Miao, Southern Yi, Santiago Matatlan/ San Juan Guelavia Zapotec; audio recordings (no EGG) are available for English and Mandarin. Recordings of Jalapa Mazatec extracted from the UCLA Phonetic Archive are also posted. All recordings are accompanied by explanatory notes and wordlists, and most are accompanied by Praat textgrids that locate target segments of interest to our project.

Analysis software developed as part of the project – VoiceSauce for audio analysis and EggWorks for EGG analysis – and all project publications are also available from this site. All preliminary analyses of the recordings using these tools (i.e. acoustic and EGG parameter values extracted from the recordings) are posted on the site in large data spreadsheets.

All of these materials are made freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike-3.0 Unported License.

This project was funded by NSF grant BCS-0720304 to Pat Keating, Abeer Alwan and Jody Kreiman of UCLA, and Christina Esposito of Macalester College.

Pat Keating (UCLA)

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We are making 24 GB of a new dataset, called Kara One, freely available. This database combines 3 modalities (EEG, face tracking, and audio) during imagined and articulated speech using phonologically-relevant phonemic and single-word prompts. It is the result of a collaboration between the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute (in the University Health Network) and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

In the associated paper (abstract below), we show how to accurately classify imagined phonological categories solely from EEG data. Specifically, we obtain up to 90% accuracy in classifying imagined consonants from imagined vowels and up to 95% accuracy in classifying stimulus from active imagination states using advanced deep-belief networks.

Data from 14 participants are available here: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~complingweb/data/karaOne/karaOne.html.

If you have any questions, please contact Frank Rudzicz at frank@cs.toronto.edu.

Best regards,

Frank

PAPER Shunan Zhao and Frank Rudzicz (2015) Classifying phonological categories in imagined and articulated speech. In Proceedings of ICASSP 2015, Brisbane Australia

ABSTRACT This paper presents a new dataset combining 3 modalities (EEG, facial, and audio) during imagined and vocalized phonemic and single-word prompts. We pre-process the EEG data, compute features for all 3 modalities, and perform binary classi?cation of phonological categories using a combination of these modalities. For example, a deep-belief network obtains accuracies over 90% on identifying consonants, which is signi?cantly more accurate than two baseline supportvectormachines. Wealsoclassifybetweenthedifferent states (resting, stimuli, active thinking) of the recording, achievingaccuraciesof95%. Thesedatamaybeusedtolearn multimodal relationships, and to develop silent-speech and brain-computer interfaces.

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In the spirit of the season, I would like to announce the immediate availability of the TORGO database free, in perpetuity for academic use. This database combines acoustics and electromagnetic articulography from 8 individuals with speech disorders and 7 without, and totals over 18 GB. These data can be used for multimodal models (e.g., for acoustic-articulatory inversion), models of pathology, and augmented speech recognition, for example. More information (and the database itself) can be found here: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~complingweb/data/TORGO/torgo.html.

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Datatang is a global leading data provider that specialized in data customized solution, focusing in variety speech, image, and text data collection, annotation, crowdsourcing services.

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Fearless Steps Corpus

John H.L. Hansen, Abhijeet Sangwan, Lakshmish Kaushik, Chengzhu Yu Center for Robust Speech Systems (CRSS), Eric Jonsson School of Engineering, The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), Richardson, Texas, U.S.A.

NASA’s Apollo program is a great achievement of mankind in the 20th century. CRSS, UT-Dallas has undertaken an enormous Apollo data digitization initiative where we proposed to digitize Apollo mission speech data (~100,000 hours) and develop Spoken Language Technology based algorithms to analyze and understand various aspects of conversational speech. Towards achieving this goal, a new 30 track analog audio decoder is designed to decode 30 track Apollo analog tapes and is mounted on to the NASA Soundscriber analog audio decoder (in place of single channel decoder). Using the new decoder all 30 channels of data can be decoded simultaneously thereby reducing the digitization time significantly. 
We have digitized 19,000 hours of data from Apollo missions (including entire Apollo-11, most of Apollo-13, Apollo-1, and Gemini-8 missions). This audio archive is named as “Fearless Steps Corpus”. This is one of the most unique and singularly large naturalistic audio corpus of such magnitude. Automated transcripts are generated by building Apollo mission specific custom Deep Neural Networks (DNN) based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system along with Apollo mission specific language models. Speaker Identification System (SID) to identify the speakers are designed. A complete diarization pipeline is established to study and develop various SLT tasks. 
We will release this corpus for public usage as a part of public outreach and promote SLT community to utilize this opportunity to build naturalistic spoken language technology systems. The data provides ample opportunity setup challenging tasks in various SLT areas. As a part of this outreach we will be setting “Fearless Challenge” in the upcoming INTERSPEECH 2018. We will define and propose 5 tasks as a part of this challenge. The guidelines and challenge data will be released in the Spring 2018 and will be available for download for free. The five challenges are, (1) Automatic Speech Recognition (2) Speaker Identification (3) Speech Activity Detection (4) Speaker Diarization (5) Keyword spotting and Joint Topic/Sentiment detection.
Looking forward for your participation (John.Hansen@utdallas.edu) 

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OPENGLOT –An open environment for the evaluation of glottal inverse filtering

OPENGLOT is a publically available database that was designed primarily for the evaluation of glottal inverse filtering algorithms. In addition, the database can be used in evaluating formant estimation methods. OPENGLOT consists of four repositories. Repository I contains synthetic glottal flow waveforms, and speech signals generated by using the Liljencrants–Fant (LF) waveform as an excitation, and an all-pole vocal tract model. Repository II contains glottal flow and speech pressure signals generated using physical modelling of human speech production. Repository III contains pairs of glottal excitation and speech pressure signal generated by exciting 3D printed plastic vocal tract replica with LF excitations via a loudspeaker. Finally, Repository IV contains multichannel recordings (speech pressure signal, EGG, high-speed video of the vocal folds) from natural production of speech.

OPENGLOT is available at:

http://research.spa.aalto.fi/projects/openglot/

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Nous sommes heureux de vous annoncer la publication d¹un ouvrage consacré
au treebank Rhapsodie, un corpus de français parlé de 33 000 mots
finement annoté en prosodie et en syntaxe.

Accès à la publication : https://benjamins.com/catalog/scl.89 (voir flyer
ci-joint)

Accès au treebank : https://www.projet-rhapsodie.fr/
Les données librement accessibles sont diffusées sous licence Creative
Commons.
Le site donne également accès aux guides d¹annotations.

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The My Science Tutor Children?s Conversational Speech Corpus (MyST Corpus) is the world?s largest English children?s speech corpus.  It is freely available to the research community for research use.  Companies can acquire the corpus for $10,000.  The MyST Corpus was collected over a 10-year period, with support from over $9 million in grants from the US National Science Foundation and Department of Education, awarded to Boulder Learning Inc. (Wayne Ward, Principal Investigator).

The MyST corpus contains speech collected from 1,374 third, fourth and fifth grade students.  The students engaged in spoken dialogs with a virtual science tutor in 8 areas of science.  A total of 11,398 student sessions of 15 to 20 minutes produced a total of 244,069 utterances.  42% of the utterances have been transcribed at the word level.  The corpus is partitioned into training and test sets to support comparison of research results across labs. All parents and students signed consent forms, approved by the University of Colorado?s Institutional Review Board,  that authorize distribution of the corpus for research and commercial use. 

The MyST children?s speech corpus contains approximately ten times as many spoken utterances as all other English children?s speech corpora combined (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_children%27s_speech_corpora). 

Additional information about the corpus, and instructions for how to acquire the corpus (and samples of the speech data) can be found on the Boulder Learning Web site at http://boulderlearning.com/request-the-myst-corpus/.   

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• HARVARD speech corpus - native British English speaker, digital re-recording

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Magic Data Technology Kid Voice TTS Corpus in Mandarin Chinese

Magic Data Technology is one of the leading artificial intelligence data service providers in the world. The company is committed to providing a wild range of customized data services in the fields of speech recognition, intelligent imaging and Natural Language Understanding.

This corpus was recorded by a four-year-old Chinese girl originally born in Beijing China. This time we published 15-minute speech data from the corpus for non-commercial use.

The contents and the corresponding descriptions of the corpus:

• The corpus contains 15 minutes of speech data, which is recorded in NC-20 acoustic studio.

• The speaker is 4 years old originally born in Beijing

• Detail information such as speech data coding and speaker information is preserved in the metadata file.

• This corpus is natural kid style.

• Annotation includes four parts: pronunciation proofreading, prosody labeling, phone boundary labeling and POS Tagging.

• The annotation accuracy is higher than 99%.

• For phone labeling, the database contains the annotation not only on the boundary of phonemes, but also on the boundary of the silence parts.

The corpus aims to help researchers in the TTS fields. And it is part of a much bigger dataset (2.3 hours MAGICDATA Kid Voice TTS Corpus in Mandarin Chinese) which was recorded in the same environment. This is the first time to publish this voice!

Please note that this corpus has got the speaker and her parents’ authorization.

Samples are available.

Do not hesitate to contact us for any questions.

Website: http://www.imagicdatatech.com/index.php/home/dataopensource/data_info/id/360

E-mail: business@magicdatatech.com

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ELRA-S0408 Speechtera Pronunciation Dictionary

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/en/catalogues/language-resources-announcements

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Paris, France, April 23, 2020

ELRA is happy to announce that Language Resources collected within the ELRC Network, funded by the European Commission, are now available from the ELRA Catalogue of Language Resources.

In total, 180 Written Corpora, 5 Multilingual Lexicons and 2 Terminological Resources, are freely available under open licences and can be downloaded directly from the catalogue. Type 'ELRC' in the catalogue search engine (http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/search/?q=ELRC) to access and download resources.

All these Language Resources can be used to support your Machine Translation solutions developments. They cover the official languages of the European Union and CEF associated countries.

More LRs coming from ELRC will be added as they become available.

*****
About ELRC
ELRC (European Language Resources Coordination) Network raises awareness and promote the acquisition and continued identification and collection of language resources in all official languages of the EU and CEF associated countries. These activities aim to help to improve the quality, coverage and performance of automated translation solutions in the context of current and future CEF digital services.

To find out more about ELRC, please visit the website: http://lr-coordination.eu


About ELRA
The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit-making organisation founded by the European Commission in 1995, with the mission of providing a clearing house for Language Resources and promoting Human Language Technologies. Language Resources covering various fields of HLT (including Multimodal, Speech, Written, Terminology) and a great number of languages are available from the ELRA catalogue. ELRA's strong involvement in the fields of Language Resources  and Language Technologies is also emphasized at the LREC conference, organized every other year since 1998.

To find out more about ELRA, please visit the website: http://www.elra.info

For more information on the catalogue, please contact Valérie Mapelli
If you would like to enquire about having your resources distributed by ELRA, please do not hesitate to contact us.

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/en/catalogues/language-resources-announcements

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Press Release - Immediate
Paris, France, May 4, 2020

ELRA and SpeechOcean signed a new Language Resources distribution agreement. On behalf of ELRA, ELDA acts as the distribution agency for SpeechOcean since 2007 and incorporated 46 new speech resources to the ELRA Catalogue of Language Resources catalogue.

Those resources were designed and collected to boost Speech Recognition. They cover the following languages:

• Chinese-Mandarin,
• French from France and Canada,
• German,
• Italian,
• Hong Kong Cantonese,
• Japanese,
• Korean,
• Pashto,
• Portuguese from Portugal and Brazil,
• Russian,
• Spanish from US and Mexico,
• Taiwanese,
• Several variants of English (English from Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Korea, United Kingdom, USA)

This new set of speech LRs leads to a total of 103 LRs distributed by ELRA on behalf of SpeechOcean, and aims to strengthen ELRA's position as the leading worldwide distribution centre. With this agreement SpeechOcean will get more visibility in particular on the European market.

The detailed list of all 103 Language Resources from SpeechOcean is available here: http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/search/?q=S0228

About SpeechOcean
Since its establishment as an AI data resource provider, Speechocean has always devoted itself to providing specialized engineering data products and services to enterprises and scientific research institutions in the whole industry chain of AI. Our business involves various domains such as speech recognition, speech synthesis, computer vision, lexicon, and natural language processing and provides relevant services for the design, collection, transcription, annotation, etc. of data.

To find out more about SpeechOcean, please visit the website: http://www.speechocean.com

About ELRA
The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit-making organisation founded by the European Commission in 1995, with the mission of providing a clearing house for Language Resources and promoting Human Language Technologies. Language Resources covering various fields of HLT (including Multimodal, Speech, Written, Terminology) and a great number of languages are available from the ELRA catalogue. ELRA's strong involvement in the fields of Language Resources  and Language Technologies is also emphasized at the LREC conference, organized every other year since 1998.

To find out more about ELRA, please visit the website: http://www.elra.info

For more information on the catalogue, please contact Valérie Mapelli

If you would like to enquire about having your resources distributed by ELRA, please do not hesitate to contact us.

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/en/catalogues/language-resources-announcements

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ELRA recognises the importance of sharing Language Resources (LRs) and making them available to the community.

Since the 2014 edition of LREC, the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, participants have been offered the possibility to share their LRs (data, tools, web-services, etc.) when submitting a paper, uploading them in a special LREC repository set up by ELRA. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map initiative (https://lremap.elra.info) for their description, contributes to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

The LREC initiative 'Share your LRs' was launched in 2014 in Reykjavik. It was successfully continued in 2016 in Portoro? and 2018 in Miyazaki.

Corresponding repositories are available here:

• 125 LRs shared in 2018 are available at https://bit.ly/3dpWdq3
• 82 LRs shared in 2016 are available at http://ow.ly/KTzf30fXoCe
• 120 LRs shared in 2014 are available at http://ow.ly/9gDm30fVMiu

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ELRA announces that MEDIA data are now available for free for academic research

Further to the request of the HLT French community to foster evaluation activities for man-machine dialogue systems for French language, ELRA has decided to provide a free access to the MEDIA speech corpora and evaluation package for academic research purposes.

The MEDIA data can be found in the ELRA Catalogue under the following references:

• ELRA-E0024  MEDIA Evaluation Package

•  ELRA-S0272 MEDIA speech database for French
  

• ELRA-S0371 PortMedia French and Italian corpus
  

Data available from the ELRA Catalogue can be obtained easily by contacting ELRA.  

The MEDIA project was carried out within the framework of Technolangue, the French national research programme funded by the French Ministry of Research and New Technologies (MRNT) with the objective of running a campaign for the evaluation of man-machine dialogue systems for French. The campaign was distributed over two actions: an evaluation taking into account the dialogue context and an evaluation not taking into account the dialogue context.

PortMedia was a follow up project supported by the French Research Agency (ANR). The French and Italian corpus was produced by ELDA, with the same paradigm and specifications as the MEDIA speech database but on a different domain.

For more information and/or questions, please write to contact@elda.org.

 *** About ELRA ***
The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit making organisation founded by the European Commission in 1995, with the mission of providing a clearing house for language resources and promoting Human Language Technologies (HLT).

To find out more about ELRA and its respective catalogue, please visit: http://www.elra.info and http://catalogue.elra.info

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We are glad to announce the public realease of the Cantor Digitalis, an open-source real-time singing synthesizer controlled by hand gestures.

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We are happy to announce the release of our new toolkit “MultiVec” for computing continuous representations for text at different granularity levels (word-level or sequences of words). MultiVec includes Mikolov et al. [2013b]’s word2vec features, Le and Mikolov [2014]’s paragraph vector (batch and online) and Luong et al. [2015]’s model for bilingual distributed representations. MultiVec also includes different distance measures between words and sequences of words. The toolkit is written in C++ and is aimed at being fast (in the same order of magnitude as word2vec), easy to use, and easy to extend. It has been evaluated on several NLP tasks: the analogical reasoning task, sentiment analysis, and crosslingual document classification. The toolkit also includes C++ and Python libraries, that you can use to query bilingual and monolingual models.

The project is fully open to future contributions. The code is provided on the project webpage (https://github.com/eske/multivec) with installation instructions and command-line usage examples.

When you use this toolkit, please cite:

@InProceedings{MultiVecLREC2016,

Title                    = {{MultiVec: a Multilingual and MultiLevel Representation Learning Toolkit for NLP}},

Author                   = {Alexandre Bérard and Christophe Servan and Olivier Pietquin and Laurent Besacier},

Booktitle                = {The 10th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2016)},

Year                     = {2016},

Month                    = {May}

}

The paper is available here: https://github.com/eske/multivec/raw/master/docs/Berard_and_al-MultiVec_a_Multilingual_and_Multilevel_Representation_Learning_Toolkit_for_NLP-LREC2016.pdf

Best regards,

Alexandre Bérard, Christophe Servan, Olivier Pietquin and Laurent Besacier

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It is our pleasure to introduce A||GO (https://allgo.inria.fr/ or http://allgo.irisa.fr/), a platform providing a collection of web-services for the automatic analysis of various data, including multimedia content across modalities. The platform builds on the back-end web service deployment infrastructure developed and maintained by  Inria?s  Service for Experimentation and Development (SED). Originally dedicated to multimedia content, A||GO progressively broadened to other fields such as computational biology, networks and telecommunications, computational graphics or computational physics.

As part of the CNRS PlaSciDo initiative [1], the Linkmedia team at IRISA / Inria Rennes is making available via A||GO a number of web services devoted to multimedia content analysis across modalities (language, audio, image, video). The web services provided currently include research results from the Linkmedia team as well as contribution from a number of partners. A list of the services available by the date is given below and the current state is available at https://www-linkmedia.irisa.fr/software along with demo videos. Most web services are interoperable, facilitating the implementation of a multimedia content analysis processing chain, and are free to use for trial, prototyping or lab work. A brief and free account creation step will allow you to execute the web-services using either the graphical interface or a command line via a dedicated API.

We expect the number of web services to grow over time and invite interested parties to contact us should they wish to contribute the multimedia web service offer of A||GO.

List of multimedia content analysis tools currently available on A||GO:
- Audio Processing
        SaMuSa: music/speech segmentation
        SilAD: silence detection
        Radi.sh: repeated audio motif discovery
        LORIA STS v2: speech transcription for the French language from LORIA
        Multi channel BSS locate: audio source localization toolbox from IRISA-PANAMA
        A-spade: audio declipper from IRISA-PANAMA
        Transvox: voice faker from LORIA
- Natural Language Processing
        NERO: name entity recognition
        TermEx: keywords/indexing terms detection
        Otis!: topic segmentation
        Hi-tost: hierarchical topic structuring
- Video Processing
        Vidseg: video shot segmentation
        HUFA: face detection and tracking
Shortcuts to Linkmedia services are also available here: https://www-linkmedia.irisa.fr/software/
 
For more information don't hesitate to contact us (contact-multimedia-allgo@irisa.fr). 

 
Gabriel Sargent and Guillaume Gravier
--
Linkmedia
IRISA - CNRS
Rennes, France

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Clickable map - Illustrations of the IPA


We have produced a clickable map showing the Illustrations of the International Phonetic
Alphabet.

The map is being updated with each new issue of the Journal of the International Phonetic
Association.

https://richardbeare.github.io/marijatabain/ipa_illustrations_all.html

Marija Tabain - La Trobe University, Australia
Richard Beare - Monash University & MCRI, Australia

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