'Robust Automatic Speech Recognition'

• The  first book that provides a comprehensive review on noise and reverberation robust speech recognition methods in the era of deep neural networks
• Connects robust speech recognition techniques to machine learning paradigms with rigorous mathematical treatment
• Provides elegant and structural ways to categorize and analyze noise-robust speech recognition techniques
• Written by leading researchers who have been actively working on the subject matter in both industrial and academic organizations for many years

https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3a%2f%2fstore.elsevier.com%2fRobust-Automatic-Speech-Recognition%2fJinyu-Li%2fisbn-9780128023983%2f.&data=01%7c01%7cygong%40exchange.microsoft.com%7c3bd27ec380c8427e97e208d2975aca2a%7c72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7c1&sdata=PRRo3i4DYNV1rNmVlhPMaHa0pUN4oi%2b1khyjctDXxjU%3d

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Barbosa, P. A. and Madureira, S. Manual de Fonética Acústica Experimental. Aplicações a dados do português. 591 p. São Paulo: Cortez, 2015. [In Portuguese]     


http://www.cortezeditora.com.br/manual-de-fonetica-acustica-experimental-1599.aspx/p

This manual of Experimental Acoustic Phonetics is conceived for Undergraduate and Graduate classes on areas such as Acoustic Phonetics, Phonology, Communications Engineering, Music, Acoustic Physics, Speech Theraphy, among others.  Starting with a theoretical and methodological presentation of Acoustic Phonetics Theory and Techniques in five chapters,  including a chapter on experimental methods, the book follows with detailed acoustic analysis of all classes of sounds using audio files from both European and Brazilian Portuguese as data.
All analyses are explained step by step using Praat. The audiofiles are available on the book web site and can be downloaded.  All techniques can be applied to any language, of course. Proposed exercices at the end of each chapter allow the teacher o evaluate the student progress.

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Les entités nommées pour le traitement automatique des langues

Damien Nouvel, Inalco, Maud Ehrmann, EPFL
Sophie Rosset, CNRS  

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R.Fuchs,  'Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English' has appeared with Springer, in the 'Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics' series: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783662478172

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Phase-Aware Signal Processing in Speech Communication: Theory and Practice

Pejman Mowlaee, Johannes Stahl, Josef Kulmer, Florian Mayer

http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1119238811.html

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Jean Caelen,Anne Xuereb

Dialogue : altérité, interaction, énaction

Editions universitaires européennes

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 Speech Coding with Code-Excited Linear Prediction

Author: Bäckström, Tom

Invited chapters from: Guillaume Fuchs, Sascha Disch, Christian Uhle and Jeremie Lecomte

Publisher: Springer

http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319502021

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Shinji Watanabe, Marc Delcroix, Florian Metze, John R. Hershey (Eds), 'New Era for Robust Seech Recognition', Springer.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-64680-0

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Nous avons le plaisir de vous annoncer la parution du volume thématique « CONSÉCUTIVITÉ ET SIMULTANÉITÉ en Linguistique, Langues et Parole » dans la Collection Dixit Grammatica (L’Harmattan, France) :
 
- CONSÉCUTIVITÉ ET SIMULTANÉITÉ en Linguistique, Langues et Parole – 1. Phonétique, Phonologie (Sous la direction de Camille Fauth, Jean-Paul Meyer, Fabrice Marsac & Rudolph Sock) • ISBN : 978-2-343-14277-7 • 5 mars 2018 • 172 pages http://www.editionsharmattan.fr/index.asp?navig=catalogue&obj=livre&no=59200&razSqlClone=1
 
- CONSÉCUTIVITÉ ET SIMULTANÉITÉ en Linguistique, Langues et Parole – 2. Syntaxe, Sémantique (Sous la direction de Angelina Aleksandrova, Céline Benninger, Anne Theissen, Fabrice Marsac & Jean-Paul Meyer) • ISBN : 978-2-343-14278-4 • 5 mars 2018 • 300 pages http://www.editionsharmattan.fr/index.asp?navig=catalogue&obj=livre&no=59201&razSqlClone=1
 
- CONSÉCUTIVITÉ ET SIMULTANÉITÉ en Linguistique, Langues et Parole – 3. Didactique, Traductologie-Interprétation (Sous la direction de Jean-Paul Meyer, Mária Pal'ová & Fabrice Marsac) • ISBN : 978-2-343-14279-1 • 5 mars 2018 • 200 pages http://www.editionsharmattan.fr/index.asp?navig=catalogue&obj=livre&no=59202&razSqlClone=1
 
Cet ouvrage collectif, qui comprend trois tomes complémentaires, rassemble des études constituant les traces écrites de communications prononcées lors du colloque international éponyme s’étant tenu à l’Université de Strasbourg (France) en juillet 2015. Les tomes renferment des travaux originaux et novateurs traitant de la dynamicité complexe du couple consécutivité-simultanéité saisi dans le domaine des Sciences du Langage. Le contenu, délibérément interdisciplinaire, concerne non seulement l’ensemble des disciplines relatives aux Sciences du langage mais aussi d’autres disciplines scientifiques, connexes mais préoccupées par des problématiques résolument linguistiques. Les éditeurs de ce volume thématique espèrent que les divers points de vue linguistiques ainsi adoptés livreront aux lecteurs un état des connaissances actualisé relativement aux différentes problématiques traitées. Il va sans dire, par ailleurs, que les auteurs comme les éditeurs apprécieront tout retour constructif de la part des lecteurs.
 
 
Fabrice Marsac et Rudolph Sock Directeurs de Dixit Grammatica

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In this newsletter:

Fall 2018 Data Scholarship Program

New Publications:

CALLFRIEND Mandarin Chinese-Mainland Dialect Second Edition

RATS Language Identification

TRAD Chinese-French Parallel Text – Broadcast News

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Fall 2018 LDC Data Scholarship Program

Student applications for the Fall 2018 LDC Data Scholarship program are being accepted now through September 15, 2018. This scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no cost. Students must complete an application which consists of a data use proposal and letter of support from their advisor.

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

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New publications:

(1) CALLFRIEND Mandarin Chinese-Mainland Dialect Second Edition was developed by LDC and consists of approximately 24 hours of unscripted telephone conversations between native speakers of the Mandarin Chinese dialect spoken in mainland China. 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 Mandarin Chinese-Mainland Dialect (LDC96S55).

All data 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 Mandarin Chinese-Mainland Dialect Second Edition is distributed via web download.

2018 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2018 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US $1000.

*

(2) RATS Language Identification was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 5,400 hours of Levantine Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Pashto and Urdu conversational telephone speech with annotation of speech segments. The corpus was created to provide training, development and initial test sets for the Language Identification (LID) task in the DARPA RATS (Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech) program.

The source audio consists of conversational telephone speech recordings from: (1) conversational telephone speech (CTS) recordings, taken either from previous LDC CTS corpora, or from CTS data collected specifically for the RATS program from Levantine Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Farsi and Dari native speakers; and (2) portions of VOA broadcast news recordings, taken from data used in the 2009 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation. The 2009 LRE Test Set is available from LDC as LDC2014S06.

CTS recordings were audited by annotators who listened to short segments and determined whether the audio was in the target language. Annotations on the audio files include start time, end time, speech activity detection (SAD) label, SAD provenance, language ID and LID provenance.

RATS Language Identification is distributed via hard drive.

2018 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2018 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US $7500.

*

(3) TRAD Chinese-French Parallel Text -- Broadcast News was developed by ELDA as part of the PEA-TRAD project. It contains French translations of a subset of approximately 30,000 Chinese characters from GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 3 (LDC2008T18). The purpose of the PEA-TRAD project (Translation as a Support for Document Analysis) was to develop speech-to-speech translation technology for multiple languages (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, Pashto) from a variety of domains.

This release consists of 977 segments (translation units) from 139 documents. The Chinese source file contains 33,571 characters and the French reference translation contains 22,424 words.  The source data is Chinese broadcast news collected and translated into English by LDC for the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program. Information about the ELDA translation team, translation guidelines and validation results is contained in the documentation accompanying this release.

TRAD Chinese-French Parallel Text – Broadcast News is distributed via web download.

2018 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2018 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US $350.

Membership Office

Linguistic Data Consortium

University of Pennsylvania

T: +1-215-573-1275

E: ldc@ldc.upenn.edu

M: 3600 Market St. Suite 810

      Philadelphia, PA 19104

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Appen ButlerHill 

A global leader in linguistic technology solutions

RECENT CATALOG ADDITIONS—MARCH 2012

1. Speech Databases

1.1 Telephony

2. Pronunciation Lexica

Appen Butler Hill has considerable experience in providing a variety of lexicon types. These include:

 Pronunciation Lexica providing phonemic representation, syllabification, and stress (primary and secondary as appropriate)

 Part-of-speech tagged Lexica providing grammatical and semantic labels

 Other reference text based materials including spelling/mis-spelling lists, spell-check dictionar-ies, mappings of colloquial language to standard forms, orthographic normalization lists.

Over a period of 15 years, Appen Butler Hill has generated a significant volume of licensable material for a wide range of languages. For holdings information in a given language or to discuss any customized development efforts, please contact: sales@appenbutlerhill.com

4. Other Language Resources

 Morphological Analyzers – Farsi/Persian & Urdu

 Arabic Thesaurus

 Language Analysis Documentation – multiple languages

For additional information on these resources, please contact: sales@appenbutlerhill.com

5. Customized Requests and Package Configurations

Appen Butler Hill is committed to providing a low risk, high quality, reliable solution and has worked in 130+ languages to-date supporting both large global corporations and Government organizations.

We would be glad to discuss to any customized requests or package configurations and prepare a cus-tomized proposal to meet your needs.

                                                         www.appenbutlerhill.com

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We are happy to announce the release of DEMAND, a set of real-world
16-channel noise recordings designed for the evaluation of microphone
array processing techniques.

http://www.irisa.fr/metiss/DEMAND/

1.5 h of noise data were recorded in 18 different indoor and outdoor
environments and are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Joachim Thiemann (CNRS - IRISA)
Nobutaka Ito (University of Tokyo)
Emmanuel Vincent (Inria Nancy - Grand Est)

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Aide à la finalisation de corpus oraux ou multimodaux pour diffusion, valorisation et dépôt pérenne

Le consortium IRCOM de la TGIR Corpus et l’EquipEx ORTOLANG s’associent pour proposer une aide technique et financière à la finalisation de corpus de données orales ou multimodales à des fins de diffusion et pérennisation par l’intermédiaire de l’EquipEx ORTOLANG. Cet appel ne concerne pas la création de nouveaux corpus mais la finalisation de corpus existants et non-disponibles de manière électronique. Par finalisation, nous entendons le dépôt auprès d’un entrepôt numérique public, et l’entrée dans un circuit d’archivage pérenne. De cette façon, les données de parole qui ont été enrichies par vos recherches vont pouvoir être réutilisées, citées et enrichies à leur tour de manière cumulative pour permettre le développement de nouvelles connaissances, selon les conditions d’utilisation que vous choisirez (sélection de licences d’utilisation correspondant à chacun des corpus déposés).

Cet appel d’offre est soumis à plusieurs conditions (voir ci-dessous) et l’aide financière par projet est limitée à 3000 euros. Les demandes seront traitées dans l’ordre où elles seront reçues par l’ IRCOM. Les demandes émanant d’EA ou de petites équipes ne disposant pas de support technique « corpus » seront traitées prioritairement. Les demandes sont à déposer du 1^er septembre 2013 au 31 octobre 2013. La décision de financement relèvera du comité de pilotage d’IRCOM. Les demandes non traitées en 2013 sont susceptibles de l’être en 2014. Si vous avez des doutes quant à l’éligibilité de votre projet, n’hésitez pas à nous contacter pour que nous puissions étudier votre demande et adapter nos offres futures.

Pour palier la grande disparité dans les niveaux de compétences informatiques des personnes et groupes de travail produisant des corpus, L’ IRCOM propose une aide personnalisée à la finalisation de corpus. Celle-ci sera réalisée par un ingénieur IRCOM en fonction des demandes formulées et adaptées aux types de besoin, qu’ils soient techniques ou financiers.

Les conditions nécessaires pour proposer un corpus à finaliser et obtenir une aide d’IRCOM sont :

• Pouvoir prendre toutes décisions concernant l’utilisation et la diffusion du corpus (propriété intellectuelle en particulier).

• Disposer de toutes les informations concernant les sources des corpus et le consentement des personnes enregistrées ou filmées.

• Accorder un droit d’utilisation libre des données ou au minimum un accès libre pour la recherche scientifique.

Les demandes peuvent concerner tout type de traitement : traitements de corpus quasi-finalisés (conversion, anonymisation), alignement de corpus déjà transcrits, conversion depuis des formats « traitement de textes », digitalisation de support ancien. Pour toute demande exigeant une intervention manuelle importante, les demandeurs devront s’investir en moyens humains ou financiers à la hauteur des moyens fournis par IRCOM et ORTOLANG.

IRCOM est conscient du caractère exceptionnel et exploratoire de cette démarche. Il convient également de rappeler que ce financement est réservé aux corpus déjà largement constitués et ne peuvent intervenir sur des créations ex-nihilo. Pour ces raisons de limitation de moyens, les propositions de corpus les plus avancés dans leur réalisation pourront être traitées en priorité, en accord avec le CP d’IRCOM. Il n’y a toutefois pas de limite « théorique » aux demandes pouvant être faites, IRCOM ayant la possibilité de rediriger les demandes qui ne relèvent pas de ses compétences vers d’autres interlocuteurs.

Les propositions de réponse à cet appel d’offre sont à envoyer à ircom.appel.corpus@gmail.com. Les propositions doivent utiliser le formulaire de deux pages figurant ci-dessous. Dans tous les cas, une réponse personnalisée sera renvoyée par IRCOM.

Ces propositions doivent présenter les corpus proposés, les données sur les droits d’utilisation et de propriétés et sur la nature des formats ou support utilisés.

Cet appel est organisé sous la responsabilité d’IRCOM avec la participation financière conjointe de IRCOM et l’EquipEx ORTOLANG.

Pour toute information complémentaire, nous rappelons que le site web de l'Ircom (http://ircom.corpus-ir.fr) est ouvert et propose des ressources à la communauté : glossaire, inventaire des unités et des corpus, ressources logicielles (tutoriaux, comparatifs, outils de conversion), activités des groupes de travail, actualités des formations, ...

L'IRCOM invite les unités à inventorier leur corpus oraux et multimodaux - 70 projets déjà recensés - pour avoir une meilleure visibilité des ressources déjà disponibles même si elles ne sont pas toutes finalisées.

Le comité de pilotage IRCOM

Utiliser ce formulaire pour répondre à l’appel : Merci.

Réponse à l’appel à la finalisation de corpus oral ou multimodal

Nom du corpus :

Nom de la personne à contacter :

Adresse email :

Numéro de téléphone :

Nature des données de corpus :

Existe-t’il des enregistrements :

Quel média ? Audio, vidéo, autre…

Quelle est la longueur totale des enregistrements ? Nombre de cassettes, nombre d’heures, etc.

Quel type de support ?

Quel format (si connu) ?

Existe-t’il des transcriptions :

Quel format ? (papier, traitement de texte, logiciel de transcription)

Quelle quantité (en heures, nombre de mots, ou nombre de transcriptions) ?

Disposez vous de métadonnées (présentation des droits d’auteurs et d’usage) ?

Disposez-vous d’une description précise des personnes enregistrées ?

Disposez-vous d’une attestation de consentement éclairé pour les personnes ayant été enregistrées ? En quelle année (environ) les enregistrements ont eu lieu ?

Quelle est la langue des enregistrements ?

Le corpus comprend-il des enregistrements d’enfants ou de personnes ayant un trouble du langage ou une pathologie ?

Si oui, de quelle population s’agit-il ?

Dans un souci d’efficacité et pour vous conseiller dans les meilleurs délais, il nous faut disposer d’exemples des transcriptions ou des enregistrements en votre possession. Nous vous contacterons à ce sujet, mais vous pouvez d’ores et déjà nous adresser par courrier électronique un exemple des données dont vous disposez (transcriptions, métadonnées, adresse de page web contenant les enregistrements).

Nous vous remercions par avance de l’intérêt que vous porterez à notre proposition. Pour toutes informations complémentaires veuillez contacter Martine Toda martine.toda@ling.cnrs.fr ou à ircom.appel.corpus@gmail.com.

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Rhapsodie: un Treebank prosodique et syntaxique de français parlé

Nous avons le plaisir d'annoncer que la ressource Rhapsodie, Corpus de français parlé annoté pour la prosodie et la syntaxe, est désormais disponible sur http://www.projet-rhapsodie.fr/

Le treebank Rhapsodie est composé de 57 échantillons sonores (5 minutes en moyenne, au total 3h de parole, 33000 mots) dotés d’une transcription orthographique et phonétique alignées au son.

Il s'agit d’une ressource de français parlé multi genres (parole privée et publique ; monologues et dialogues ; entretiens en face à face vs radiodiffusion, parole plus ou moins interactive et plus ou moins planifiée, séquences descriptives, argumentatives, oratoires et procédurales) articulée autour de sources externes (enregistrements extraits de projets antérieurs, en accord avec les concepteurs initiaux) et internes. Nous tenons en particulier à remercier les responsables des projets CFPP2000, PFC, ESLO, C-Prom ainsi que Mathieu Avanzi, Anne Lacheret, Piet Mertens et Nicolas Obin.

Les échantillons sonores (wave & MP3, pitch nettoyé et lissé), les transcriptions orthographiques (txt), les annotations macrosyntaxiques (txt), les annotations prosodiques (xml, textgrid) ainsi que les metadonnées (xml & html) sont téléchargeables librement selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’utilisation commerciale - Partage dans les mêmes conditions 3.0 France.

Les annotations microsyntaxiques seront disponibles prochainement

 Les métadonnées sont également explorables en ligne grâce à un browser.

 Les tutoriels pour la transcription, les annotations et les requêtes sont disponibles sur le site Rhapsodie.

 Enfin, L’annotation prosodique est interrogeable en ligne grâce au langage de requêtes Rhapsodie QL.

 L'équipe Ressource Rhapsodie (Modyco, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre)

Sylvain Kahane, Anne Lacheret, Paola Pietrandrea, Atanas Tchobanov, Arthur Truong.

 Partenaires : IRCAM (Paris), LATTICE (Paris), LPL (Aix-en-Provence), CLLE-ERSS (Toulouse).

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Rhapsodie: a Prosodic and Syntactic Treebank for Spoken French

We are pleased to announce that Rhapsodie, a syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French created with the aim of modeling the interface between prosody, syntax and discourse in spoken French is now available at   http://www.projet-rhapsodie.fr/

The Rhapsodie treebank is made up of 57 short samples of spoken French (5 minutes long on average, amounting to 3 hours of speech and a 33 000 word corpus) endowed with an orthographical phoneme-aligned transcription . 

The corpus is representative of different genres (private and public speech; monologues and dialogues; face-to-face interviews and broadcasts; more or less interactive discourse; descriptive, argumentative and procedural samples, variations in planning type).

The corpus samples have been mainly drawn from existing corpora of spoken French and partially created within the frame of theRhapsodie project. We would especially like to thank the coordinators of the  CFPP2000, PFC, ESLO, C-Prom projects as well as Piet Mertens, Mathieu Avanzi, Anne Lacheret and Nicolas Obin.

The sound samples (waves, MP3, cleaned and stylized pitch), the orthographic transcriptions (txt), the macrosyntactic annotations (txt), the prosodic annotations  (xml, textgrid) as well as the metadata (xml and html) can be freely downloaded under the terms of the Creative Commons licence Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 France.

Microsyntactic annotation will be available soon.

The metadata are  searchable on line through a browser.

The prosodic annotation can be explored on line through the Rhapsodie Query Language.

The tutorials of transcription, annotations and Rhapsodie Query Language  are available on the site.

The Rhapsodie team (Modyco, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre :

Sylvain Kahane, Anne Lacheret, Paola Pietrandrea, Atanas Tchobanov, Arthur Truong.

Partners: IRCAM (Paris), LATTICE (Paris), LPL (Aix-en-Provence),CLLE-ERSS (Toulouse).

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We have created and made publicly available a dense audio-visual person-oriented ground-truth annotation of a feature movie (100 minutes long): “Hannah and her sisters” by Woody Allen.

The annotation includes

•          Face tracks in video (densely annotated, i.e., in each frame, and person-labeled)

•             Speech segments in audio (person-labeled)

•             Shot boundaries in video



The annotation can be useful for evaluating



•   Person-oriented video-based tasks (e.g., face tracking, automatic character naming, etc.)

•             Person-oriented audio-based tasks (e.g., speaker diarization or recognition)

•             Person-oriented multimodal-based tasks (e.g., audio-visual character naming)



Detail on Hannah dataset and access to it can be obtained there:

https://research.technicolor.com/rennes/hannah-home/

https://research.technicolor.com/rennes/hannah-download/



Acknowledgments:

This work is supported by AXES EU project: http://www.axes-project.eu/










Alexey Ozerov Alexey.Ozerov@technicolor.com

Jean-Ronan Vigouroux,

Louis Chevallier

Patrick Pérez

Technicolor Research & Innovation



 

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Text to         Speech Synthesis:
      over an hour of speech       synthesis samples from         1968 to 2001 by       25 French, Canadian, US , Belgian,       Swedish, Swiss systems
     
      33 ans de synthèse de la parole à         partir du texte: une promenade sonore (1968-2001)
        (33 years of Text to Speech Synthesis       in French : an audio tour (1968-2001)       )
      Christophe d'Alessandro
      Article published in         Volume 42 - No. 1/2001 issue of  Traitement       Automatique des Langues  (TAL,       Editions Hermes),         pp. 297-321.
     
      posted to:
      http://groupeaa.limsi.fr/corpus:synthese:start

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Further to the establishment of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) as a unique and universal identification schema for Language Resources on November 18, 2013, ELRA, LDC and AFNLP/Oriental-COCOSDA now announce the opening of the ISLRN Portal (www.islrn.org). As a service free of charge for all Language Resource providers and under the supervision of a steering committee composed of representatives of participating organisations, the ISLRN Portal provides unique identifiers using a standardised nomenclature.

Overview
The 13-digit ISLRN format is: XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX-X. It can be allocated to any Language Resource; its composition is neutral and does not include any semantics in reference to the type or nature of the Language Resource. The ISLRN is a randomly created number with a check digit that validates a Verhoeff algorithm.

Two types of external players may interact with the ISLRN Portal: Visitors and Providers. Visitors may browse the web site and search for the ISLRN of a given Language Resource by its name or by its number if it exists. Providers are registered and own credentials. They can request a new ISLRN for a given Language Resource. A provider has the possibility to become certified, after moderation, in order to be able to import metadata in XML format.

The functionalities that can be accessed by Visitors are:

-          Identify a language resource according to its ISLRN
-          Identify an ISLRN by the name of a language resource
-          Get information about ISLRN, FAQ, Basic Metadata, Legal Information
-          View last 5 accepted resources (“What’s new” block on home page)
-          Sign up to become a provider

The functionalities that can be accessed by Providers, once they have signed up, are:

-          Log in
-          Request an ISLRN according to the metadata of a given resource
-          Request to become a certified provider so as to import XML files containing metadata
-          Import one or more metadata descriptions in XML to request ISLRN(s) (only for certified providers)
-          Edit pending requests
-          Access previous requests
-          Contact a Moderator or an Administrator
-          Edit Providers’ own profile

ISLRN request is handled by moderators within 5 working days.
Contact: islrn@elda.org

Background
The International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) is a unique and universal identification schema for Language Resources which provides Language Resources with unique identifier using a standardised nomenclature. It also ensures that Language Resources are correctly identified, and consequently, recognised with proper references for their usage in applications in R&D projects, products evaluation and benchmark as well as in documents and scientific papers. Moreover, it is a major step in the interconnected world that Human Language Technologies (HLT) has become: unique resources must be identified as they are and meta-catalogues need a common identification format to manage data correctly.

The ISLRN does not intend to replace local and specific identifiers, it is not meant to be a legal deposit, not an obligation, but rather an essential and best practice. For instance a resource that is distributed by several data centres will still have the “local” data-centre identifier but will have a unique ISLRN.

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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, please visit www.elra.info.

About LDC
Founded in 1992, the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is an open consortium of universities, companies and government research laboratories. It creates, collects and distributes speech and text databases, lexicons, and other resources for research and development purposes. The University of Pennsylvania is the LDC's host institution. To find out more about LDC, please visit www.ldc.upenn.edu.

About AFNLP
The mission of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) is to promote and enhance R&D relating to the computational analysis and the automatic processing of all languages of importance to the Asian region by assisting and supporting like-minded organizations and institutions through information sharing, conference organization, research and publication co-ordination, and other forms of support. To find out more about AFNLP, please visit www.afnlp.org.

About Oriental-COCOSDA
The International Committee for the Co-ordination and Standardisation of Speech Databases and Assesment Techniques, Oriental-COCOSDA, has been established to encourage and promote international interaction and cooperation in the foundation areas of Spoken Language Processing, especially for Speech Input/Output. To find out more about Oriental-COCOSDA, please visit our web site: www.cocosda.org

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Speechocean – update (August 2018):

Speechocean: A global language resources and data services supplier

About Speechocean

Speechocean is one of the world well-known language related resources & services provider in the fields of Human Computer Interaction and Human Language Technology. At present, we can provide data services with 110+ languages and dialects across the world.

KingLine Data Center---Data Sharing Platform

Kingline Data Center is operated and supervised by Speechocean, which is mainly focused on language resources creating and providing for research and development of human language technology.

These diversified corpora are widely used for the research and development in the fields of Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation, Web Search, etc. All corpora are openly accessible for users all over the world, including users from scientific research institutions, enterprises or individuals.

For more detailed information, please visit our website: http://kingline.speechocean.com

New released data:

1. http://kingline.speechocean.com/exchange.php?id=4693&act=view

S.N：King-TTS-019

Name: Russian Speech Synthesis Corpus (Female)

Recording Hours: 15.88 Hours

Utterances: 8,930

Parameters: 44.1k, 16bit

Channels: 2 Channels (waveform + EGG signal)

Phoneme Set: SAMPA

The whole database contains waveform data, phone boundary labeling files, prosody labeling, stress labeling, property of speech labeling files and pronunciation lexicon.

The voice talent was a 28-year-old female broadcaster. She was born and raised in Moscow.

The recording was in a professional studio. The voice talent recorded 2 to 3 times per week and lasted for about 2 months. While recording, there were 2 recording engineers (one of them is a native speaker) monitoring and guiding the voice talent. They were responsible for recording quality and text and pronunciation correctness.

2. Chinese Mandarin Speech Synthesis Corpus (Female)

ID: King-TTS-031

Name: Chinese Mandarin Speech Synthesis Corpus (Female)

Recording Hours: 41.86 Hours

Utterances: 24,733 (Chinese / English / Mixed)

Parameters: 48k, 16bit

Channels: 1 Channel (waveform)

Phoneme Set: Pinyin and CMU

The whole database contains waveform data, phone boundary labeling files and prosody labeling.

The voice talent was a female broadcaster. She was born and raised in Shan Xi, China.

The recording was in a professional studio. The voice talent recorded 1 to 2 times per week and lasted for about 12 months. While recording, there were 2 recording engineers (native speakers) monitoring and guiding the voice talent. They were responsible for recording quality and text and pronunciation correctness.

3. American English Speech Synthesis Corpus (Female)

ID: King-TTS-033

Name: American English Speech Synthesis Corpus (Female)

Recording Hours: 19.86 Hours

Utterances: 13,709

Parameters: 48k, 16bit

Channels: 1 Channel (waveform)

Phoneme Set: CMU

The whole database contains waveform data, phone boundary labeling files, prosody labeling and pronunciation lexicon.

The voice talent was a 33-year-old female broadcaster. She was born and raised in Minneapolis, America.

The recording was in a professional studio. The voice talent recorded 2 to 3 times per week and lasted for about 2 months. While recording, there were 2 recording engineers (one of them is a native speaker) monitoring and guiding the voice talent. They were responsible for recording quality and text and pronunciation correctness.

4. Chinese Child’s Voice Speech Synthesis Corpus (Female)

ID: King-TTS-040

Name: Chinese Child’s Voice Speech Synthesis Corpus (Female)

Recording Hours: 1.15 Hours

Utterances: 1,001

Parameters: 48k, 24bit

Channels: 1 Channel (waveform)

Phoneme Set: Pinyin

The whole database contains waveform data, scripts, phone boundary labeling files, prosody labeling and POS labeling.

The voice talent was a 7-year-old girl. She was born and raised in Shan Dong, China

The recording was in a professional studio. It lasted for about 2 months and the voice talent recorded 80~100 utterance each time. While recording, there were 2 recording engineers (native speakers) monitoring and guiding the voice talent. They were responsible for recording quality and text and pronunciation correctness.

Contact Information

Xianfeng Cheng

Vice President

Tel: +86-10-62660928; +86-10-62660053 ext.8080

Mobile: +86-13681432590

Skype: xianfeng.cheng1

Email: chengxianfeng@speechocean.com

cxfxy0cxfxy0@gmail.com

Website: http://en.speechocean.com/

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kidLUCID: London UCL Children’s Clear Speech in Interaction Database

We are delighted to announce the availability of a new corpus of spontaneous speech for children aged 9 to 14 years inclusive, produced as part of the ESRC-funded project on ‘Speaker-controlled Variability in Children's Speech in Interaction’ (PI: Valerie Hazan).

Speech recordings (a total of 288 conversations) are available for 96 child participants (46M, 50F, range 9;0 to 15;0 years), all native southern British English speakers. Participants were recorded in pairs while completing the diapix spot-the-difference picture task in which the pair verbally compared two scenes, only one of which was visible to each talker. High-quality digital recordings were made in sound-treated rooms. For each conversation, a stereo audio recording is provided with each speaker on a separate channel together with a Praat Textgrid containing separate word- and phoneme-level segmentations for each speaker.

There are six recordings per speaker pair made in the following conditions:

• NOB (No barrier): both speakers heard each other normally

• VOC (Vocoder): one conversational partner heard the other's speech after it had been processed in real time through a noise-excited three channel vocoder

• BAB (Babble): one conversational partner heard the other's speech in a background of adult multi-talker babble at an approximate SNR of 0 dB.

The kidLUCID corpus is available online within the OSCAAR (Online Speech/Corpora Archive and Analysis Resource) archive (https://oscaar.ci.northwestern.edu/). Free access can be requested for research purposes. Further information about the project can be found at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/research/shaps/research/shaps/research/clear-speech-strategies

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council Grant No. RES-062- 23-3106.

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We are happy to announce the release of a table of 44 publicly available robust speech processing datasets and a table of 4 ASR software tools on the wiki of ISCA's Robust Speech Processing SIG:
https://wiki.inria.fr/rosp/Datasets#Speech_datasets
https://wiki.inria.fr/rosp/Software#Automatic_speech_recognition

We hope that these tables will promote wider dissemination of the datasets and software tools available in our community and help newcomers select the most suitable dataset or software for a given experiment. We plan to provide additional tables on, e.g., room impulse response datasets or speaker recognition software in the future.

We highly welcome your input, especially additional tables/entries and reproducible baselines for each dataset. It just takes a few minutes thanks to the simple wiki interface.

For more information about joining the SIG and contributing, see
https://wiki.inria.fr/rosp/

Jonathan Le Roux, Emmanuel Vincent, and Ramon Astudillo

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ELRA and LDC partner to implement ISLRN process and assign identifiers to all the Language Resources in their catalogues.

Following the meeting of the largest NLP organizations, the NLP12, and their endorsement of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN), ELRA and LDC partnered to implement the ISLRN process and to assign identifiers to all the Language Resources (LRs) in their catalogues. The ISLRN web portal was designed to enable the assignment of unique identifiers as a service free of charge for all Language Resource providers. To enhance the use of ISLRN, ELRA and LDC have collaborated to provide the ISLRN 13-digit ID to all the Language Resources distributed in their respective catalogues. Anyone who is searching the ELRA and LDC catalogues can see that each Language Resource is now identified by both the data centre ID and the ISLRN number. All providers and users of such LRs should refer to the latter in their own publications and whenever referring to the LR.

ELRA and LDC will continue their joint involvement in ISLRN through active participation in this web service.

Visit the ELRA and LDC catalogues, respectively at http://catalogue.elra.info and https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu

Background

The International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) aims to provide unique identifiers using a standardised nomenclature, thus ensuring that LRs are correctly identified, and consequently, recognised with proper references for their usage in applications within R&D projects, product evaluation and benchmarking, as well as in documents and scientific papers. Moreover, this is a major step in the networked and shared world that Human Language Technologies (HLT) has become: unique resources must be identified as such and meta-catalogues need a common identification format to manage data correctly.

The ISLRN portal can be accessed from http://www.islrn.org,

***About NLP12***

Representatives of the major Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics organizations met in Paris on 18 November 2013 to harmonize and coordinate their activities within the field.
The results of this coordination are expressed in the Paris Declaration: http://www.elra.info/NLP12-Paris-Declaration.html.

*** 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, please visit our web site: http://www.elra.info

*** About LDC ***

The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is an open consortium of universities, libraries, corporations and research laboratories that creates and distributes linguistic resources for language-related education, research and technology development.

To find out more about LDC, please visit our web site: https://www.ldc.upenn.edu


For more information, please contact: admin@islrn.org

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JRC, the EC's Joint Research Centre, an important LR player: First to adopt the ISLRN initiative

The Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's in house science service, is the first organisation to use the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) initiative and has requested ISLRN 13-digit unique identifiers to its Language Resources (LR).
Thus, anyone who is using JRC LRs may now refer to this number in their own publications.

The current JRC LRs (downloadable from https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/language-technologies) with an ISLRN ID are:

• DGT-Acquis, ISLRN: 393-866-130-658-2
• DGT-TM, ISLRN: 710-653-952-884-4
• EAC-TM, ISLRN: 589-927-543-547-4
• ECDC-TM, ISLRN: 476-596-396-497-8
• English sentiment quotes, ISLRN: 574-735-957-886-6
• JRC-Acquis, ISLRN: 821-325-977-001-1
• JRC-Names, ISLRN: 328-863-023-410-2
• Multilingual summary evaluation data, ISLRN: 762-292-165-648-8
• Turkish Tweet Named Entity annotation, ISLRN: 764-177-227-350-7

Background

The International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) aims to provide unique identifiers using a standardised nomenclature, thus ensuring that LRs are correctly identified, and consequently, recognised with proper references for their usage in applications within R&D projects, product evaluation and benchmarking, as well as in documents and scientific papers. Moreover, this is a major step in the networked and shared world that Human Language Technologies (HLT) has become: unique resources must be identified as such and meta-catalogues need a common identification format to manage data correctly.
The ISLRN portal can be accessed from http://www.islrn.org,

*** About the JRC ***

As the Commission's in-house science service, the Joint Research Centre's mission is to provide EU policies with independent, evidence-based scientific and technical support throughout the whole policy cycle.
Within its research in the field of global security and crisis management, the JRC develops open source intelligence and analysis systems that can automatically harvest and analyse a huge amount of multi-lingual information from the internet-based sources. In this context, the JRC has developed Language Technology resources and tools that can be used for highly multilingual text analysis and cross-lingual applications.
To find out more about JRC's research in open source information monitoring, please visit https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/research-topic/internet-surveillance-systems. To access media monitoring applications directly, go to http://emm.newsbrief.eu/overview.html.

*** 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, please visit our web site: http://www.elra.info

For more information, contact admin@ilsrn.org
 

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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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Press Release - Immediate - Paris, France, April 2, 2015

Opening of the ELRA License Wizard

ELRA announces the opening of the License Wizard @ http://wizard.elda.org.

ELRA  is deploying a License Wizard to:

• support the right-holders in finding the appropriate licenses under which to share/distribute their Language Resources, and
• clarify the legal obligations applicable in various licensing situations.

Currently, the License Wizard allows the user to choose among several licenses that exist for the use of Language Resources: ELRA, Creative Commons and META-SHARE.
More will be added.

The License Wizard works as a web configurator that helps Right Holders/Users:

- to select a number of legal features and obtain the user license adapted to their selection.
- to define which user licenses they would like to select in order to distribute their Language Resources.
- to integrate the user license terms into a Distribution Agreement that could be proposed to ELRA or META-SHARE  for further distribution through the ELRA Catalogue of Language Resources (http://catalogue.elra.info,  www.meta-share.eu).

Background
From the very beginning, ELRA has come across all types of legal issues that arise when exchanging and sharing Language Resources. The association has devoted huge efforts to streamline the licensing processes while continuously monitoring the impacts of regulation changes on the HLT community activities. The first major step was to come up with a few licenses for both the research and the industrial sectors to use the resources available within the ELRA catalogue. Recently, its strong involvement in the META-SHARE infrastructure led to designing and drafting a small set of licenses, inspired by the ELRA licenses but also accounting for the new trends of permissive licenses and free resources, represented in particular by the Creative Commons.

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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.

1, Speech data collection

2, Speech data synthesis

3, Speech data transcription

I’ve attached our company introduction as reference, as well as available speech data lists as follows:

If you find any particular interested datasets, we could provide you samples with costs too.

Regards

Runze Zhao

zhaorunze@datatang.com 

Oversea Sales Manager | Datatang Technology 

China

M: +86 185 1698 2583

18 Zhongguancun St.

Kemao Building Tower B 18F

Beijing 100190

US

M: +1 617 763 4722 

640 W California Ave, Suite 210

Sunnyvale, CA 94086

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Press Release ? Immediate

Paris, France, June 8, 2017

The International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) assigned to LRE Map 2016 Language Resources

As a follow-up of the LRE Map 2016 initiative, ELRA has processed the information on existing and newly-created Language Resources provided by the authors submitting at LREC 2016 Conference (http://lrec2016.lrec-conf.org). In order to increase the visibility of these resources, ELRA has allocated ISLRNs to 106 submitted languages resources. They distribute as follows:

• 73 Corpora (ca. written, spoken, multimodal)
  
• 30 Lexicons (including ontologies)
  
• 3 Evaluation Data

The meta-information for these language resources is also available on the ISLRN website with a broad international audience.

Background

As part of an international effort to document and archive the various language resource development efforts around the world, a system of assigning ISLRNs was established in November 2013. The ISLRN is a unique persistent identifier to be assigned to each language resource. The establishment of ISLRNs was a major step in the networked and shared world of human language technologies. Unique resources must be identified as they are, and meta-catalogues require a common identification format to manage data correctly. Therefore, language resources should carry identical identification schemes independent of their representations, whatever their types and wherever their physical locations (on hard drives, internet or intranet). Visit: http://islrn.org/.

About LRE Map

Initiated by ELRA and FlareNet at LREC 2010 (http://www.lrec-conf.org), the LRE Map is a mechanism intended to monitor the use and creation of language resources by collecting information on both existing and newly-created resources during the submission process. Apart from providing a portrait of the resources behind the community, of their uses and usability, the LRE Map intends to be a measuring instrument for monitoring the field of language resources. The feature has been so successful that it has been implemented also at other major conferences like COLING, IJCNLP, Interspeech, LTC, ACLHT, O-COCOSDA, RANLP, in addition to the LRE Journal. Visit: http://lremap.elra.info

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.

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

Contact: info@elda.org

The International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) is becoming an increasingly widespread persistent identifier

Since the deployment of ISLRN, 3 years ago, the number of Language Resources which were allocated an ISLRN has grown significantly to reach 2500+. These LRs include raw and annotated corpora, lexicons and dictionaries, speech resources (conversational, synthesis, etc.), evaluation sets and multimodal resources, and cover 219 distinct languages (including sign languages).

In the first place, the ISLRN system has been endorsed by two large data centers, namely ELRA (European Language Resources Association) and LDC (Linguistic Data Consortium) which team up to maintain jointly the assignment process. Other significant contributions come from institutions like the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the Resource Management Agency (RMA), the Institute for Applied Linguistics (IULA) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF).

Moreover, authors are invited to quote the ISLRN of each Language Resource they are referring to in the paper(s) they are submitting to LREC Conferences, which makes the persistent identifier a key factor of the LR citation process.

Background

As part of an international effort to document and archive the various Language Resource development efforts around the world, a system assigning ISLRNs was established in November 2013 and deployed in April 2014. The ISLRN is a unique persistent identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The establishment of ISLRNs was a major step in the networked and shared world of Human Language Technologies. Unique resources must be identified as they are, and meta-catalogues require a common identification format to manage data correctly. Therefore, Language Resources should carry identical identification schemes regardless their representations, their types and their storage place (hard drives, internet or intranet) (http://islrn.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.

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

References

LDC: https://www.ldc.upenn.edu

JRC: https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/research-topic/internet-surveillance-systems

RMA: http://rma.nwu.ac.za

UPF: http://www.iula.upf.edu  and https://www.upf.edu/web/universitat

LREC Conferences: www.lrec-conf.org

Read also: Valérie Mapelli, Vladimir Popescu, Lin Liu and Khalid Choukri, Language Resource Citation: the ISLRN Dissemination and Further Developments, in Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016), Portoro?, Slovenia: http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2016/summaries/1251.html

Contact: mapelli@elda.org

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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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Press Release - Immediate
Paris, France, February 14, 2018

The new Catalogue of Language Resources now opening.

ELRA is happy to release a new version of its Catalogue of Language Resources publicly.

Completely redesigned, with a new interface and an improved navigation, the new Catalogue allows visitors an easier access to the 1075 Language Resources (LRs) and their corresponding description. Among the new features, the Catalogue now offers an extended metadata to describe the LRs, a refined search on the Catalogue data for finding more specific information using criteria such as language, resource or media type, license, etc.

Currently, LRs can be selected, and placed in a cart from where the user can send a request for quotation to initiate the order. When logging in, the user selects LRs and obtains distribution details (licensing information, prices) depending on his/her user status: ELRA member/Non-member, Research vs Commercial organization. The full e-commerce integration will be completed at a later stage.

More functionalities pertaining to the ELRA Catalogue, including the ISLRN automatic submission and the e-licensing module (automatic filling in and electronic signature), will be developed and integrated.

Please visit this new version of the Catalogue here: http://catalogue.elra.info

*** 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, please visit: http://www.elra.info.

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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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VocalTractLab 2.0 : A tool for articulatory speech synthesis

It is my pleasure to announce the release of the new major version 2.0 of VocalTractLab. VocalTractLab is an articulatory speech synthesizer and a tool to visualize and explore the mechanism of speech production with regard to articulation, acoustics, and control. It is available from http://www.vocaltractlab.de/index.php?page=vocaltractlab-download .
Compared to version 1.0, the new version brings many improvements in terms of the implemented models of the vocal tract, the vocal folds, the acoustic simulation, and articulatory control, as well as in terms of the user interface. Most importantly, the new version comes together with a manual.

If you like, give it a try. Reports on bugs and any other feedback are welcome.

Peter Birkholz

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    The release 1.2.0 of the Bob signal-processing and machine learning toolbox is available .
    Bob provides both efficient implementations of several machine     learning algorithms as well as a framework to help researchers to     publish reproducible research.
   
   

   
    The previous release of Bob was providing:
    * image, video and audio IO interfaces such as jpg, avi, wav, 
    * database accessors such as FRGC, Labelled Face in the Wild, and many     others,
    *mage processing: Local Binary Patterns (LBPs), Gabor Jets,  SIFT,
    * machines  and trainers such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs), k-Means,     Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), Inter-Session Variability modeling     (ISV), Joint Factor Analysis (JFA), Probabilistic Linear     Discriminant Analysis (PLDA), Bayesian intra/extra (personal)     classifier,
   
    The new release of Bob has brought the following features and/or improvements, such as:
    * Unified implementation of Local Binary Patterns (LBPs),
    * Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) implementation,
    * Total variability (i-vector) implementation,
    * Conjugate gradient based-implementation for logistic regression,
    * Improved multi-layer perceptrons implementation (Back-propagation can now be easily used in combination with any optimizer -- i.e     L-BFGS),
    * Pseudo-inverse-based method for Linear Discriminant Analysis,
    * Covariance-based method for Principal Component Analysis,
    * Whitening and within-class covariance normalization techniques,
    * Module for object detection and keypoint localization     (bob.visioner),
    * Module for audio processing including feature extraction such as LFCC and     MFCC,
    * Improved extensions (satellite packages), that now support both     Python and C++ code, within an easy to use framework,
    * Improved documentation and add new tutorials,
    * Support for Intel's MKL (in addition to ATLAS),
    * Extend supported platforms (Arch Linux).
   
    This release represents a major milestone in Bob with plenty of  functionality improvements (>640 commits in total) and plenty of bug fixes.
    • Sources and Documentation
    • Binary packages:
    •     Ubuntu: 10.04, 12.04, 12.10 and 13.04
    • For     Mac OSX: works with 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion) and 10.8     (Mountain Lion)
   
    For instructions on how to install pre-packaged version on Ubuntu or     OSX, consult our quick       installation instructions  (N.B. OS X macport has not yet been     upgraded. This will be done very soon. cf. https://trac.macports.org/ticket/39831 ).
   
   
    Best regards,
    Elie Khoury (on Behalf of the Biometric Group at Idiap lead by Sebastien Marcel)
   
     
     ---    

 Dr. Elie Khoury Post Doctorant Biometric Person Recognition Group 

IDIAP Research Institute (Switzerland) Tel : +41 27 721 77 23

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Release of the version 2 of FASST (Flexible Audio Source Separation Toolbox). http://bass-db.gforge.inria.fr/fasst/ This toolbox is intended to speed up the conception and to automate the implementation of new model-based audio source separation algorithms. It has the following additions compared to version 1: * Core in C++ * User scripts in MATLAB or python * Speedup * Multichannel audio input We provide 2 examples: 1. two-channel instantaneous NMF 2. real-world speech enhancement (2nd CHiME Challenge, Track 1)

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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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