Prosodic Patterns in English Conversation

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

Cambridge University Press, 2019.

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

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

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

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Voice Quality

The Laryngeal Articulator Model

Hardback 978-1-108-49842-5

John H. Esling, University of Victoria, British Columbia

Scott R. Moisik, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Allison Benner, University of Victoria, British Columbia

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

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

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

Informed by instrumental examinations of the laryngeal articulatory

mechanism, it revises our understanding of articulatory postures to explain

the actions, vibrations and resonances generated in the epilarynx and

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

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

segmental and syllabic sounds. Phonetic illustrations of phonation types

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

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

The book presents computational simulations, the laryngeal and voice

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

surgeries that entail compensatory laryngeal articulator adjustment, and an

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

the evolution of speech.

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

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

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

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

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

change, language ontogeny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dear all,

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Voice Attractiveness

Studies on Sexy, Likable, and Charismatic Speakers

Special session at Interspeech 2017

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 My name is Jens Blauert, and you may recall me as an ESCA-Founder and ISCA-Goldmedalist. Although I am professor emeritus since many years, I am still active in science.
     Recently I published an edited book together with Jonas Braasch (Professor at RPI, Troy NY) at both SPRINGER and ASA-Press. The book?s title is ?The Technology of Binaural Understanding?. It attempts to bridge between audition and cognition and thus, as far as speech communication is concerned, between speech and language. The book's motto is:

     People, when exposed to acoustic stimuli, do not react directly to what they hear
     but rather to what they hear means to them.

     Obviously this is an issue which is also relevant for speech communication at large. Thus, I kindly  ask you to consider whether this book would qualify for a book announcement in the ISCAPad. If a full book review were also feasible, I can send you an eBook-link, and after a reviewer is has been assigned, SPRINGER will deliver a printed copy to him/her.
--   Thank you for your efforts in advance!
     With best regards, Jens Blauert

.PS. Preface and  table of contents of the book are available under the following link:
      https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030003852      

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In this newsletter:
Renew your LDC Membership today 

New Publications:
2017 NIST OpenSAT Pilot - SSSF
LORELEI Kinyarwanda Incident Language Pack

Renew your LDC Membership today 
The importance of curated resources for language-related education, research, and technology development drives LDC’s mission to create them, to accept data contributions from researchers across the globe, and to broadly share such resources through the LDC Catalog. LDC members enjoy no-cost access to new corpora released annually, as well as the ability to license legacy data sets from among our 900 holdings at reduced fees. Ensure that your data needs continue to be met by renewing your LDC membership or by joining the Consortium today.

Now through March 1, 2022, 2021 members receive a 10% discount on 2022 membership, and new or returning organizations receive a 5% discount. Membership remains the most economical way to access current and past LDC releases. Consult Join LDC for more details on membership options and benefits. 

New publications:

(1) 2017 NIST OpenSAT Pilot - SSSF was developed by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and contains approximately one hour of operational speech data, transcripts, and annotation files used in the speech activity detection, automatic speech recognition, and keyword search tasks of the 2017 OpenSAT Pilot evaluation. The source audio consists of radio and telephone dispatches during the Sofa Super Store fire (Charleston, South Carolina) in June 2007 (SSSF).

The OpenSAT evaluation series was designed to bring together researchers developing different types of technologies to address speech analytic challenges present in some of the most difficult acoustic conditions The 2017 pilot focused on the public safety communications domain. The SSSF audio represents real-world, fire response, operational data with multiple challenges for system analytics, such as land-mobile-radio transmission effects, significant background noise, speech under stress and variable decibel levels. 

2017 NIST OpenSAT Pilot - SSSF is distributed via web download.  

2022 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2022 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for $250.

*

(2) LORELEI Kinyarwanda Incident Language Pack was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 11.9 million words of Kinyarwanda monolingual text, 35,000 words of English monolingual text, 3.4 million words of parallel and comparable Kinyarwanda-English text, and 50,000 words each of English and Kinyarwanda data annotated for Entity Discovery and Linking and Situation Frames. It constitutes all of the text data, annotations, supplemental resources, and related software tools for the Kinyarwanda language that were used in the DARPA LORELEI / LoReHLT 2018 Evaluation.

The LORELEI (Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents) program was concerned with building human language technology for low resource languages in the context of emergent situations. In the evaluation scenario, an unforeseen event triggered a need for humanitarian and logistical support in a region where the incident language had received little or no attention in NLP research. Evaluation participants provided NLP solutions, including information extraction and machine translation, with limited resources and limited development time.

Data was collected from news, social network, weblog, newsgroup, discussion forum, and reference material. Entity detection and linking annotation identified entities to be detected by systems for scoring purposes. Situation frame analysis was designed to extract basic information about needs and relevant issues for planning a disaster response effort.

The knowledge base for entity linking annotation is available separately as LORELEI Entity Detection and Linking Knowledge Base (LDC2020T10).

LORELEI Kinyarwanda Incident Language Pack is distributed via web download.

2022 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2022 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for $250.

Membership Coordinator

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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Forensic database of voice recordings of 500+ Australian English speakers

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

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

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

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

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Audio and Electroglottographic speech recordings from several languages

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pat Keating (UCLA)

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

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

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

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

Best regards,

Frank

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

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

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

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

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

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

OPENGLOT is available at:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Magic Data Technology Kid Voice TTS Corpus in Mandarin Chinese

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

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

The contents and the corresponding descriptions of the corpus:

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

• The speaker is 4 years old originally born in Beijing

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

• This corpus is natural kid style.

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

• The annotation accuracy is higher than 99%.

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

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

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

Samples are available.

Do not hesitate to contact us for any questions.

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

E-mail: business@magicdatatech.com

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ELRA-S0408 Speechtera Pronunciation Dictionary

Visit our On-line Catalogue: http://catalog.elra.info
Visit the Universal Catalogue: http://universal.elra.info
Archives of ELRA Language Resources Catalogue Updates: http://www.elra.info/en/catalogues/language-resources-announcements

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Paris, France, April 23, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Visit our On-line Catalogue: http://catalog.elra.info
Visit the Universal Catalogue: http://universal.elra.info
Archives of ELRA Language Resources Catalogue Updates: http://www.elra.info/en/catalogues/language-resources-announcements

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

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

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

• ELRA-E0024  MEDIA Evaluation Package

•  ELRA-S0272 MEDIA speech database for French
  

• ELRA-S0371 PortMedia French and Italian corpus
  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Out of the 7,000+ language spoken around the world, only a few have associated Language Technologies. The majority of languages can be considered as 'under-resourced' or as 'not supported'. This situation, very detrimental to many languages speakers, and specifically indigenous languages speakers, creates a digital divide,  and places many languages in danger of digital extinction, if not complete extinction.

Organized as part of the 2019 International Year of Indigenous Languages, the 1st edition of LT4All (Language Technologies for All: Enabling Linguistic Diversity and Multilingualism Worldwide) took place in Paris at the UNESCO Headquarters on December 4-6, 2019 and gathered 400 participants from various backgrounds (including language science and technology researchers, linguists, industrials, indigenous peoples, language policy and decision makers) from all over the world.

The LT4All Programme and Editorial Committees are very happy to announce that the set of Research Papers and Posters collected at the occasion of LT4All is now available online at : https://lt4all.elra.info/proceedings/lt4all2019/

****
LT4All has  been made possible thanks to the close cooperation between UNESCO, the  Government of the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug-Ugra (Russian Federation), the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) and its Special Interest  Group on Under-resourced  languages  (SIGUL), and in partnership with UNESCO Intergovernmental Information for All Programme (IFAP) and the Interregional Library Cooperation Centre, as well as with support of other public organizations and sponsors.

More information including the list of all the sponsors and supporters @ https://en.unesco.org/LT4All

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Search and Find ELRA LRs on Google Dataset Search and ELG LT Platform

ELRA is happy to announce that all the Language Resources from its Catalogue can now be searched and found on Google Dataset Search and on the ELG Language Technology platform developed within the European Language Grid project.

In order to allow the indexing by Google Dataset Search, ELRA has updated the code generating the catalogue pages. The code developed follows the schema.org standard and is publicly available in JSON format so that it can be used for other harvesting purposes.

The ELRA Catalogue is already indexed and harvested by famous repositories and archives such as OLAC (Open Language Archives Community), CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory and META-SHARE.

For 25 years now, ELRA has been distributing Language Resources to support research and development in various fields of Human Language Technology. The indexing on both Google Dataset Search and the ELG LT Plaform is increasing ELRA Catalogue?s visibility, making the LRs known to new visitors from the Human Language Technologies, Artificial Intelligence and other related fields.

*** 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).

ELRA Catalogue of Language Resources: http://catalogue.elra.info

More about ELRA, please visit: http://www.elra.info.

*** About Google Dataset Search ***

Google Dataset Search is a search engine for datasets that enables users to search through a list of data repositories indexed through a standardised schema.

More about Google Dataset Search: https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/

*** About European Language Grid ***

The European Language Grid (ELG) is a project funded by the European Union through the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. It aims to be a primary platform for Language Technology in Europe.

More about the European Language Grid project: https://www.european-language-grid.eu/

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

Since the 2014 edition of LREC, the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, participants have been offered the possibility to share their LRs (data, tools, web-services, etc.) when submitting a paper, uploading them in a special LREC repository set up by ELRA.

This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map initiative (https://lremap.elra.info) for their description, contributes to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

Despite the cancellation of LREC 2020 in Marseille, a high number of contributions was submitted and the LREC initiative 'Share your LRs' could be conducted to the end successfully.

Repositories corresponding to each edition of the conference are available here:

• 179 LRs shared in 2020 are available at https://bit.ly/3o836kM
• 125 LRs shared in 2018 are available at https://bit.ly/3dpWdq3
• 82 LRs shared in 2016 are available at http://ow.ly/KTzf30fXoCe
• 120 LRs shared in 2014 are available at http://ow.ly/9gDm30fVMiu

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With NSF support, our interdisciplinary team of voice research at UCLA recently put together a public database that we believe will be of interest to many members of the ISCA community. On behalf of my co-authors (Patricia Keating, Jody Kreiman, Abeer Alwan, Adam Chong), I'm writing to ask if we could advertise our database in the ISCA newsletter. We'd really appreciate your help with this.

The UCLA Variability Speaker Database comprises high-quality audio recordings from 202 speakers, 101 men 

and 101 women, performing 12 brief speech tasks in English over three recording sessions (total amount 

of speech: 300-450 sec per speaker). This public database was designed to sample variability in speaking 

within individual speakers and across a large number of speakers. The large set of speakers (similar in age) 

sampled from the current university community is gender-balanced and has a variety of language backgrounds. 

The database can serve as a testing ground for research questions involving between-speaker variability, 

within-speaker variability, and text-dependent variability. 

More details about the database are available in a readme file that can be sent on request.

--Cynthia Yoonjeong Lee

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We are pleased to announce that Language Resources entrusted to ELRA for distribution and shared by the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC), in Spain, are now available for free for academic research purposes (for ELRA institutional members) and at substantially decreased costs for commercial purposes. All data have been developed to enhance Speech technologies in Catalan, Spanish and Arabic.

The Language Resources can be found in the ELRA Catalogue under the following references:

Visit our On-line Catalogue: http://catalog.elra.info
Visit the Universal Catalogue: http://universal.elra.info
Archives of ELRA Language Resources Catalogue Updates: http://www.elra.info/en/catalogues/language-resources-announcements

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A USC Multispeaker speech production articulatory datasets of vocal tract MRI video
 the 'USC 75-Speaker Speech MRI Database'  is a new freely-available speech production data set with accompanying software  tools:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-021-00976-x

These data contain 2D sagittal-view RT-MRI videos along with synchronized  audio for 75 subjects performing linguistically motivated speech tasks,  alongside the corresponding raw RT-MRI data. The dataset also includes
3D volumetric vocal tract MRI during sustained speech sounds and  high-resolution static anatomical T2-weighted upper airway MRI for each  subject. 

Other speech production datasets of articulatory data that are also freely available  include  a TIMIT articulatory data corpus and emotional speech production data, all available from:  https://sail.usc.edu/span/resources.html

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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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Chères et chers collègues,  

Après plusieurs années de travail, nous avons le plaisir de vous annoncer la mise en ligne du protocole d?évaluation des troubles moteurs de la parole MONPAGE, version 2.0.s, à présent normalisé et validé.

Cet outil, mis librement à disposition de la communauté, est destiné à l?évaluation clinique des troubles moteurs de la parole légers à modérés (dysarthries et apraxies de la parole) chez l?adulte francophone. Il a été élaboré par un groupe de chercheurs et cliniciens belges, suisses, français et québécois. Il s?agit d?une batterie d?évaluation de la parole comprenant une passation informatisée (avec enregistrement des productions des patients) et des analyses perceptives et acoustiques semi-automatiques. Sa prise en main nécessite un minimum de compétences en phonétique acoustique.

Vous trouverez la présentation, les références, les ressources et les liens de téléchargement de MonPaGe-2.0.s sur le site : https://lpp.in2p3.fr/monpage/
Nous recommandons de commencer la prise en main en lisant le manuel de l'utilisateur.

N'hésitez pas à diffuser l'information!
Pour l?équipe MonPaGe,
Véronique


Prof. Véronique Delvaux, PhD
Chercheur qualifié FNRS à l'UMONS
Chargée de cours UMONS & ULB
Service de Métrologie et Sciences du Langage
Local ?1.7, Place du Parc, 18, 7000 Mons
+3265373140

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