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ISCApad Archive  »  2011  »  ISCApad #151  »  Resources

ISCApad #151

Monday, January 10, 2011 by Chris Wellekens

5 Resources
5-1 Books
5-1-1Spoken Language Processing

Spoken Language Processing, edited by Joseph Mariani (IMMI and
LIMSI-CNRS, France). ISBN: 9781848210318. January 2009. Hardback 504 pp

Publisher ISTE-Wiley

Speech processing addresses various scientific and technological areas. It includes speech analysis and variable rate coding, in order to store or transmit speech. It also covers speech synthesis, especially from text, speech recognition, including speaker and language identification, and spoken language understanding. This book covers the following topics: how to realize speech production and perception systems, how to synthesize and understand speech using state-of-the-art methods in signal processing, pattern recognition, stochastic modeling, computational linguistics and human factor studies. 


More on its content can be found at
http://www.iste.co.uk/index.php?f=a&ACTION=View&id=150

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5-1-2L'imagerie medicale pour l'etude de la parole

Alain Marchal, Christian Cave

Eds Hermes Lavoisier

99 euros • 304 pages • 16 x 24 • 2009 • ISBN : 978-2-7462-2235-9

Du miroir laryngé à la vidéofibroscopie actuelle, de la prise d'empreintes statiques à la palatographie dynamique, des débuts de la radiographie jusqu'à l'imagerie par résonance magnétique ou la magnétoencéphalographie, cet ouvrage passe en revue les différentes techniques d'imagerie utilisées pour étudier la parole tant du point de vue de la production que de celui de la perception. Les avantages et inconvénients ainsi que les limites de chaque technique sont passés en revue, tout en présentant les principaux résultats acquis avec chacune d'entre elles ainsi que leurs perspectives d'évolution. Écrit par des spécialistes soucieux d'être accessibles à un large public, cet ouvrage s'adresse à tous ceux qui étudient ou abordent la parole dans leurs activités professionnelles comme les phoniatres, ORL, orthophonistes et bien sûr les phonéticiens et les linguistes.

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5-1-3Korpusbasierte Sprachverarbeitung

Author: Christoph Draxler
Title: Korpusbasierte Sprachverarbeitung
Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag Tübingen
Year: 2008
Link: http://www.narr.de/details.php?catp=&p_id=16394

Summary: Spoken language is a major area of linguistic research and speech technology development. This handbook presents an introduction to the technical foundations and shows how speech data is collected, annotated, analysed, and made accessible in the form of speech databases. The book focuses on web-based procedures for the recording and processing of high quality speech data, and it is intended as a desktop reference for practical recording and annotation work. A chapter is devoted to the Ph@ttSessionz database, the first large-scale speech data collection (860+ speakers, 40 locations in Germany) performed via the Internet. The companion web site (http://www.narr-studienbuecher.de/Draxler/index.html) contains audio examples, software tools, solutions to the exercises, important links, and checklists. 

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5-1-4Linear Predictive Coding and the Internet Protocol, by Robert M. Gray

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

 

Volume 3, Issue 3                                                                                                                                                                                                 

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

By Robert M. Gray (Stanford University)                                                                                                                                                                  

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

 

Volume 3, Issue  4

 

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

By Robert M. Gray (Stanford University)                                                                                                                                                                  

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

 

The links above will take you to the article abstracts.

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5-2 Database
5-2-1Bell System Technical Journal (1922-1983) available .
I received this very good news from Joseph P. Campbell (MIT Lincoln
Laboratory):

The entire Bell System Technical Journal from 1922--1983 is now
available on line! It is offered in PDF format sorted by year, volume, and
issue; and it is searchable:

http://bstj.bell-labs.com/

BSTJ holds a wealth of consolidated information of outstanding contributions
from Bell Labs over the years. For example, check out Fletcher's 1922
article 'The Nature of Speech and Its Interpretation', BSTJ, vol 1, no 1.
Also see Shannon's landmark paper and much, much more!

As Joe pointed out, the current generation of researchers didn't grow up
with BSTJs under their bed like we both did, but for the older generation
that remembers these great articles, this is indeed very good news.

--Isabel Trancoso
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5-2-2ELRA Language Resources Catalogue Update (June 2010)

ELRA is happy to announce that 2 new Speech Desktop/Microphone resources, 1 new Terminological Resource and 1 Written Corpus are now available in its catalogue: 

 
ELRA-S0305 EPAC Corpus: orthographic transcriptions
This corpus consists of approx. 100 hours of manual orthographic transcriptions, which were produced from 1,677 hours of non transcribed recordings from the ESTER Evaluation Campaign (Technolangue programme). This corpus also consists of automatic transcriptions of the full 1,677 hours.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1119
 
ELRA-S0307 BABEL Polish database
The BABEL Polish Database is a speech database that was produced by a research consortium funded by the European Union under the COPERNICUS programme (COPERNICUS Project 1304). It consists of the basic 'common' set which contains the Many Talker Set (30 males, 30 females), the Few Talker Set (5 males, 5 females), the Very Few Talker Set (1 male, 1 female).
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1120
 
ELRA-T0374 Terminology database of natural sciences
This dictionary covers the three kingdoms: Animal, Vegetal, Mineral. It contains 50,000 species with numerous synonyms in French, English and Latin and many breeds and varieties. Minerals are given with their chemical formula. About 7,900 definitions in French are included. It also includes synonyms and linguistic variants.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1121
 
ELRA-W0053 Catalan-Spanish Parallel Corpus
This corpus contains more than 100 million words and it contains 10 years of bilingual articles from “El Periódico de Catalunya”. The data are aligned at sentence level and stored in text files, in a one sentence per line basis. The data are provided in plain text, with no encoding whatsoever.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1122
 
******
Moreover, please note that the content of the following 3 Terminological Resources has been updated and their prices have been revised:
 
ELRA-T0102 Terminology database of expressions
This resource comprises over about 26,000-30,000 expressions, such as sayings, proverbs, idioms, slogans, citations, exclamations, onomatopoeias and figurative expressions of French and English. Several grammatical topics that are included in some sentences are also handled. This resource contains synonyms. The DISCIPLINE field refers to the expression category: proverbs, idioms, postposition verbs.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=114
 
ELRA-T0103 Terminology database of finance 
This dictionary covers the three kingdoms: Animal, Vegetal, Mineral. It contains 50,000 species with numerous synonyms in French, English and Latin and many breeds and varieties. Minerals are given with their chemical formula. About 7,900 definitions in French are included. It also includes synonyms and linguistic variants.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=115
 
ELRA-T0367 Terminology database of telecommunication
This resource comprises over 89,200 entries in the field of telecommunication. It also contains many synonyms and abbreviations in both languages, as well as meaning, case or applications for polysemic terms.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=659
 
For more information on the catalogue, please contact Valérie Mapelli mailto:mapelli@elda.org
 
Visit our On-line Catalogue: http://catalog.elra.info
Visit the Universal Catalogue: http://universal.elra.info 
Archives of ELRA Language Resources Catalogue Updates: http://www.elra.info/LRs-Announcements.html   
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
***************************************************************** 
ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update 
***************************************************************** 
 
In the framework of our ongoing campaign for updating and reducing the prices of the language resources distributed in the ELRA catalogue, ELRA is happy to announce that the prices for the following resources have been substantially reduced:
 
ELRA-S0074 British English SpeechDat(II) MDB-1000
This speech database contains the recordings of 1,000 British speakers recorded over the British mobile telephone network. Each speaker uttered around 40 read and spontaneous items.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=723
 
ELRA-S0075 Welsh SpeechDat(II) FDB-2000
This speech database contains the recordings of 2,000 Welsh speakers recorded over the British fixed telephone network. Each speaker uttered around 40 read and spontaneous items.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=557
 
ELRA-S0101 Spanish SpeechDat(II) FDB-1000 
This speech database contains the recordings of 1,000 Castillan Spanish speakers recorded over the Spanish fixed telephone network. Each speaker uttered around 40 read and spontaneous items. 
This database is a subset of the Spanish SpeechDat(II) FDB-4000 (ref. ELRA-S0102).
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=726
 
ELRA-S0102 Spanish SpeechDat(II) FDB-4000
This speech database contains the recordings of 4,000 Castillan Spanish speakers recorded over the Spanish fixed telephone network. Each speaker uttered around 40 read and spontaneous items.
This database includes the Spanish SpeechDat(II) FDB-1000 (ref. ELRA-S0101).
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=727
 
ELRA-S0140 Spanish SpeechDat-Car database
The Spanish SpeechDat-Car database contains the recordings in a car of 306 speakers, who uttered around 120 read and spontaneous items. Recordings have been made through 5 different channels, of which 4 were in-car microphones (1 close-talk microphone, 3 far-talk microphones) and 1 channel over the GSM network.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=690
 
ELRA-S0141 SALA Spanish Venezuelan Database 
This speech database contains the recordings of 1,000 Venezuelan speakers recorded over the Venezuelan fixed telephone network. Each speaker uttered around 50 read and spontaneous items.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=736
 
ELRA-S0297 Hungarian Speecon database 
The Hungarian Speecon database comprises the recordings of 555 adult Hungarian speakers and 50 child Hungarian speakers who uttered respectively over 290 items and 210 items (read and spontaneous).
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1094
 
ELRA-S0298 Czech Speecon database
The Czech Speecon database comprises the recordings of 550 adult Czech speakers and 50 child Czech speakers who uttered respectively over 290 items and 210 items (read and spontaneous).
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1095
 
 
For more information on the catalogue, please contact Valérie Mapelli mailto:mapelli@elda.org
 
Visit our On-line Catalogue: http://catalog.elra.info
Visit the Universal Catalogue: http://universal.elra.info 
Archives of ELRA Language Resources Catalogue Updates: http://www.elra.info/LRs-Announcements.html
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5-2-3LDC Newsletter (December 2010)

In this newsletter:

 

Spring 2011 LDC Data Scholarship Program  -

 

LDC to Close for Winter Break  -

 

New publications:

LDC2010T24
Indian Language Part-of-Speech Tagset: Hindi -

 

LDC2010T22
Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus First Release  -

 

LDC2010T23
-   NIST 2009 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation  -

 


 
Spring 2011 LDC Data Scholarship Program

 

Applications are now being accepted through January 31, 2011 for the Spring 2011 LDC Data Scholarship program!  The LDC Data Scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost.  LDC offered data scholarships for the first time earlier this year.  We received many strong applications from students with a range of research interests.  Our student winners received no-cost copies of LDC data valued at over US$10,000. 

This program is open to students pursuing both undergraduate and graduate studies in an accredited college or university. LDC Data Scholarships are not restricted to any particular field of study; however, students must demonstrate a well-developed research agenda and a bona fide inability to pay. 

The application consists of two parts:

 

(1) Data Use Proposal. Applicants must submit a proposal describing their intended use of the data. The proposal must contain the applicant's name, university, and field of study. The proposal should state which data the student plans to use and contain a description of their research project.  Students are advised to consult the LDC Corpus Catalog for a complete list of data distributed by LDC. Due to certain restrictions, a handful of LDC corpora are restricted to members of the Consortium.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The deadline for the Spring 2011 program cycle is January 31, 2011.

 

LDC to Close for Winter Break

 

LDC will be closed from Friday, December 24, 2010 through Friday, December 31, 2010 in accordance with the University of Pennsylvania Winter Break Policy.  Our offices will reopen on Monday, January 3, 2011.  Requests received for membership renewals and corpora will be processed at that time.

 

Best wishes for a happy and safe holiday season!

 

New Publications

 

(1)  Indian Language Part-of-Speech Tagset: Hindi is a corpus developed by Microsoft Research (MSR) India to support the task of Part-of-Speech Tagging (POS) and other data-driven linguistic research on Indian Languages in general. It is created as a part of the Indian Language Part-of-Speech Tagset (IL-POST) project, a collaborative effort among linguists and computer scientists from MSR India, AU-KBC (Anna University, Chennai), Delhi University, IIT Bombay, Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi) and Tamil University (Tamilnadu).

 

The goal of the IL-POST project is to provide a common tagset framework for Indian Languages that offers flexibility, cross-linguistic compatibility and reusability across those languages. It supports a three-level hierarchy of Categories, Types and Attributes. The corpus mainly consists therefore of two different levels of information for each lexical token: (a) lexical Category and Types, and (b) set morphological attributes and their associated values in the context.

 

This corpus contains 4859 sentences (98,450 words) of manually annotated Hindi text randomly collected from the Microsoft Hindi Research Corpus, sourced from the publisher WebDunia. All annotated data is provided in both xml and text files. The xml files are contained in the 'XML_files' folder and the text files in the 'text_files' folder. Each data file contains between 900-5,000 words. The XML file contains metadata about the material, such as language, encoding and data size.

 

The Annotation Guidelines for Hindi, included in this release, contain a detailed description of the annotation methodology. The Annotation Tool Guideline 1.0, also included in this publication, describes the annotation interface developed for the IL-POST framework; the tool is not included in this corpus.

 

Indian Language Part-of-Speech Tagset: Hindi is distributed via web download.

 

2010 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc provided that they have submitted a completed copy of the Microsoft Research India License Agreement.   2010 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data by submitting a completed copy of the Microsoft Research India License Agreement. The agreement can be faxed to +1 215 573 2175 or scanned and emailed to this address.  This data is available at no charge.

 

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(2)  Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus First Release (MASC I) is the first of three releases of 500,000 words of MASC data developed as part of the American National Corpus (ANC) project. MASC I consists of approximately 80,000 words of contemporary spoken and written American English annotated for a variety of linguistic phenomena. The MASC project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and was established to address, to the extent possible, many of the obstacles to the creation of large-scale, robust, multiply-annotated corpora of English covering a wide range of genres of written and spoken language data. Researchers from Vassar College, Columbia University and the International Computer Science Institute, University of California at Berkeley are the principal participants; the WordNet project provides consulting.

 

The source texts in MASC I are drawn from the open portion of the American National Corpus (ANC) Second Release LDC2005T35, which includes written texts and spoken transcripts of American English from a  broad range of genres produced since 1990; and from the Language Understanding Annotation Corpus LDC2009T09, (LU Corpus), a collection of various genres including broadcast, newswire, email and telephone speech annotated for committed belief, event and entity coreference, dialog acts and temporal relations. All of the words of data in MASC I have validated annotations for token, part of speech, sentence boundary, noun chunks, verb chunks, named entities and Penn Treebank syntax. Full-text FrameNet annotations are available for seventeen texts and WordNet word sense annotations are available for 1000 occurrences of each of fifty-three words. Annotations of all or portions of the sub-corpus for a wide variety of other linguistic phenomena have been contributed by other projects. Software and services available from the ANC project website enable transduction of MASC into a wide variety of physical formats.

 

The MASC directory contains two folders: 'masc-1.0.3' and 'masc_wordsense'. masc-1.0.3 contains the actual MASC corpus and consists of two folders, 'spoken' and 'written'. The spoken folder contains data and annotations for spoken material, and the written folder contains the same for written texts. The files in each of the respective folders have naming conventions that describe the contents of the file.  masc_wordsense contains the MASC sentence samples with word sense annotations using WordNet sense numbers as the annotation values.

 

Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus First Release (MASC I) is distributed via web download.

 

2010 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  2010 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may request this data by completing a copy of the LDC User Agreement for Non-Members.  The agreement can be faxed +1 215 573 2175 or scanned and emailed to this address.  This data is available at no charge.

 

 
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(3)  NIST 2009 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation is a package containing source data, reference translations and scoring software used in the NIST 2009 OpenMT evaluation. It is designed to help evaluate the effectiveness of machine translation systems. The package was compiled and scoring software was developed by researchers at NIST, making use of broadcast, newswire and web data and reference translations collected and developed by LDC. The 2009 task was to evaluate translation from Arabic to English and Urdu to English.

 

This release contains  373 documents with corresponding sets of four separate human expert reference translations. The source data is comprised of Arabic and Urdu broadcast, newswire and weblog data collected by LDC in 2007 and 2009. The newswire and broadcast material are from Asharq Al-Awsat (Arabic), Agence France-Presse (Arabic), Al-Ahram (Arabic), Al Hayat (Arabic), Assabah (Arabic), An Nahar (Arabic), Al-Quds Al-Arabi (Arabic), Xinhua News Agency (Arabic), British Broadcasting Corporation (Urdu), Deutsche Welle (Urdu), Mehr News Agency (Urdu) and Voice of America (Urdu).

 

For each language, the test set consists of two files: a source and a reference file. Each file contains four independent translations of the data set. The evaluation year, source language, test set (which, by default, is 'evalset'), version of the data, and source vs. reference file (with the latter being indicated by '-ref') are reflected in the file name. A reference file contains four independent reference translations unless noted otherwise in the accompanying README.txt.

 

This evaluation kit includes scoring software. The data is provided in both SGML and XML formats.

 

NIST 2009 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation is distributed via web download.

 

2010 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  2010 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$150.

 

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5-2-4ELDA Distribution Campaign 2010

 ELDA Distribution Campaign 2010
*****************************************************************

ELDA is launching a special distribution campaign offering very favorable conditions for the language resources acquisition,
including discounts on public prices, from the ELRA Catalogue of Language Resources (see http://catalog.elra.info).

This offer will be open until the end of December 2010.
 
For more information on this offer, please contact Valérie Mapelli (mapelli@elda.org)

Visit our On-line Catalogue: http://catalog.elra.info
Visit the Universal Catalogue: http://universal.elra.info
Archives of ELRA Language Resources Catalogue Updates: http://www.elra.info/LRs-Announcements.html

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5-3 Software


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