ISCA - International Speech
Communication Association


ISCApad Archive  »  2011  »  ISCApad #158  »  Resources

ISCApad #158

Thursday, August 04, 2011 by Chris Wellekens

5 Resources
5-1 Books
5-1-1Alain Marchal, Christian Cave, L'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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5-1-2Christoph Draxler, Korpusbasierte 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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5-1-3Robert M. Gray, Linear Predictive Coding and the Internet Protocol

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

 

Volume 3, Issue 3                                                                                                                                                                                                 

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

By Robert M. Gray (Stanford University)                                                                                                                                                                  

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

 

Volume 3, Issue  4

 

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

By Robert M. Gray (Stanford University)                                                                                                                                                                  

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

 

The links above will take you to the article abstracts.

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5-1-4M. Embarki and M. Ennaji, Modern Trends in Arabic Dialectology

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

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

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

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



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

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

Editors: Gokhan Tur and Renato De Mori

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

Brief Description (please use as you see fit):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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5-1-6Jody Kreiman, Diana Van Lancker Sidtis ,Foundations of Voice Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and Perception

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

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

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


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5-2 Database
5-2-1ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update (2011-05)


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ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update
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ELRA is happy to announce that 2 new Multimodal and 3 new Speech Resources are now available in its catalogue.
Moreover, two Speech Resources previously announced are now available at better pricing conditions.

1) New Language Resources:

ELRA-S0314 LILA Marathi database
The LILA Marathi database comprises 2,002 Marathi speakers (992 males and 1010 females) recorded over the Korean mobile telephone network. Each speaker uttered around 46 read and spontaneous items.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1136

ELRA-S0315 A-SpeechDB
A-SpeechDB© is an Arabic speech database which contains about 20 hours of continuous speech recorded through one desktop omni microphone by 205 native speakers (about 30% of females and 70% of males), aged between 20 and 45. Automatically generated transcriptions are provided with a manually revised version for each sentence.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1140

ELRA-S0316 SmartKom Home (SKH)
Release SKH 1.0 contains 130 recordings in the technical setup ('scenario') SmartKom Home which should be an intelligent communication assistant for the private environment. Naive users were asked to test a 'prototype' for a market study not knowing that the system was in fact controlled by two human operators. They were asked to solve two tasks in a period of 4.5 minutes while they were left alone with the system.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1137

ELRA-S0317 SmartKom Mobil (SKM)
Release SKM 1.0 contains 146 recordings in the technical setup ('scenario') SmartKom Mobil which is a portable PDA equipped with a net link and additional intelligent communication devices. Naive users were asked to test a 'prototype' for a market study not knowing that the system was in fact controlled by two human operators. They were asked to solve two tasks in a period of 4,5 min while they were left alone with the system.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1138

ELRA-S0318 SmartKom Audio (SKAUDIO)
Release SKAUDIO 1.0 contains all audio channel recordings of the SmartKom corpora SmartKom Public (cf. ELRA-S0136), SmartKom Home (cf. ELRA-S0316) and SmartKom Mobil (cf. ELRA-S0317).
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1139


2) Revised Language Resources (new pricing conditions):

ELRA-S0136 SmartKom Public (SKP)
Release SKP 2.0 contains 172 recordings in the technical setup ('scenario') SmartKom Public which is comparable to a traditional public phone booth but equipped with additional intelligent communication devices. Naive users were asked to test a 'prototype' for a market study not knowing that the system was in fact controlled by two human operators. They were asked to solve two tasks in a period of 4.5 minutes while they were left alone with the system.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1130

ELRA-S0281 LILA Hindi-L1 database
The LILA Hindi-L1 database comprises 2,030 Hindi speakers (1,012 males and 1,018 females, all speakers with Hindi as first language) recorded over the Indian mobile telephone network. Each speaker uttered around 60 read and spontaneous items.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1071


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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5-2-2LDC Newsletter (July 2011)

In this newsletter:

LDC Sponsors a Student Group at 2011 International Linguistics Olympiad  -

LDC Receives META Prize from META-NET  -

New publications:

2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Data  -

2006 NIST Spoken Term Detection Evaluation Set  -

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



LDC Sponsors a Student Group at 2011 International Linguistics Olympiad

LDC is happy to support the 2011 International Linguistics Olympiad  by sponsoring a student team. The IOL is one of the twelve International Science Olympiads and is an annual event that brings together students from around the world to compete in linguistically–based challenges. This year’s competition takes place from July 24-30 at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA  USA. Students do not need to have a background in linguistics in order to participate since they typically use analysis and deductive reasoning to solve the competition problems.

Please visit the 2011 IOL website for additional details. We wish good luck to all of the participants!

 

LDC Receives META Prize from META-NET

 LDC was awarded a ‘2nd META Prize’ from META-NET ‘for outstanding long term commitment to the preparation and distribution of language resources and technologies.’

 The META Prize is awarded by META-NET to those who provide outstanding products or services that support the European Multilingual Information Society. META-NET is a Network of Excellence dedicated to fostering the technological foundations of a multilingual European information society. Several organizations were honored at this year’s META Forum in Budapest; LDC and ELRA were both honored for supporting and developing language resources.

New Publications

(1) 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Data was developed at LDC and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). It consists of 525 hours of conversational telephone speech in English, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Russian and Spanish and associated English transcripts used as test data in the NIST-sponsored 2005 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). The ongoing series of SRE yearly evaluations conducted by NIST are intended to be of interest to researchers working on the general problem of text independent speaker recognition. To that end the evaluations are designed to be simple, to focus on core technology issues, to be fully supported and accessible.

The task of the 2005 SRE evaluation was speaker detection, that is, to determine whether a specified speaker is speaking during a given segment of conversational speech. The task was divided into 20 distinct and separate tests involving one of five training conditions and one of four test conditions. Further information about the task conditions is contained in the The NIST Year 2005 Speaker Recognition Evaluation Plan.

The speech data consists of conversational telephone speech with 'multi-channel' data collected by LDC simultaneously from a number of auxiliary microphones. The files are organized into two segments: 10 second two-channel excerpts (continuous segments from single conversations that are estimated to contain approximately 10 seconds of actual speech in the channel of interest) and 5 minute two-channel conversations.

The data are stored as 8-bit u-law speech signals in NIST SPHERE format. In addition to the standard header fields, the SPHERE header for each file contains some auxiliary information that includes the language of the conversation and whether the data was recorded over a telephone line.  English language word transcripts in .cmt format were produced using an automatic speech recognition system (ASR) with error rates in the range of 15-30%.

2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Data is distributed on 7 DVD-ROM.

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

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(2) 2006 NIST Spoken Term Detection Evaluation Set was compiled by researchers at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and contains approximately eighteen hours of  Arabic, Chinese and English broadcast news, English conversational telephone speech and English meeting room speech used in NIST's 2006 Spoken Term Detection (STD) evaluation. The STD initiative is designed to facilitate research and development of technology for retrieving information from archives of speech data with the goals of exploring promising new ideas in spoken term detection, developing advanced technology incorporating these ideas, measuring the performance of this technology and establishing a community for the exchange of research results and technical insights.

The 2006 STD task was to find all of the occurrences of a specified 'term' (a sequence of one or more words) in a given corpus of speech data. The evaluation was intended to develop technology for rapidly searching very large quantities of audio data. Although the evaluation used modest amounts of data, it was structured to simulate the very large data situation and to make it possible to extrapolate the speed measurements to much larger data sets. Therefore, systems were implemented in two phases: indexing and searching. In the indexing phase, the system processes the speech data without knowledge of the terms. In the searching phase, the system uses the terms, the index, and optionally the audio to detect term occurrences.

The evaluation corpus consists of three data genres: broadcast news (BNews), conversational telephone speech (CTS) and conference room meetings (CONFMTG). The broadcast news material was collected in 2003 and 2004  by LDC's broadcast collection system from the following sources: ABC (English), Aljazeera (Arabic), China Central TV (Chinese), CNN (English), CNBC (English), Dubaie TV (Arabic), New Tang Dynasty TV (Chinese), Public Radio International (English) and Radio Free Asia(Chinese). The CTS data was taken from the Switchboard data sets (e.g., Switchboard-2 Phase 1 LDC98S75, Switchboard-2 Phase 2 LDC99S79) and the Fisher corpora (e.g., Fisher English Training Speech Part 1 LDC2004S13), also collected by LDC. The conference room meeting material consists of goal-oriented, small group round table meetings and was collected in  2004 and 2005 by NIST, the International Computer Science Institute (Berkeley, California), Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), TNO (The Netherlands) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Blacksburg, VA) as part of the AMI corpus project. This evaluation corpus includes scoring software. It uses the inputs described in the STD Evaluation plan to complete the evaluation of a system.

Each BNews recording is a 1-channel, pcm-encoded, 16Khz, SPHERE formatted file. CTS recordings are 2-channel, u-law encoded, 8 Khz, SPHERE formatted files. The CONFMTG files contain a single recorded channel.

2006 NIST Spoken Term Detection Evaluation Set is distributed on 1 DVD-ROM.

2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$800.

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(3) NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 2 was developed by researchers at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida (USF), Tampa, Florida and the Multimodal Information Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It contains approximately thirteen hours of meeting room video data collected in 2001 and 2002 at NIST's Meeting Data Collection Laboratory and used in the VACE (Video Analysis and Content Extraction) 2005 evaluation.

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

Three performance evaluations were conducted under the auspices of the VACE program between 2004 and 2007.  The 2005 evaluation was administered by USF in collaboration with NIST and guided by an advisory forum including the evaluation participants.

LDC has previously released NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program -- Meeting Data Training Set Part 1 LDC2011V01, NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program -- Meeting Data Training Set Part 2 LDC2011V02 and NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program -- Meeting Data Test Set Part 1 LDC2011V03.

NIST's Meeting Data Collection Laboratory is designed to collect corpora to support research, development and evaluation in meeting recognition technologies. It is equipped to look and sound like a conventional meeting space. The data collection facility includes five Sony EV1-D30 video cameras, four of which have stationary views of a center conference table (one view from each surrounding wall) with a fixed focus and viewing angle, and an additional 'floating' camera which is used to focus on particular participants, whiteboard or conference table depending on the meeting forum. The data is captured in a NIST-internal file format. The video data was extracted from the NIST format and encoded using the MPEG-2 standard in NTSC format. Further information concerning the video data parameters can found in the documentation included with this corpus.

NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 2 is distributed on 8 DVD-ROM.

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

 


 

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5-2-3ELRA receives the META Prize at the META-FORUM 2011 in Budapest

Paris, France, July 18, 2011

ELRA receives the META Prize at the META-FORUM 2011 in Budapest


During the META-FORUM 2011 which took place in Budapest (Hungary) on June 27-28, 2011, ELRA, a world-wide leading player providing Language Resources-related services to the HLT community, has received the META Prize for “Outstanding long-term commitment to the preparation and distribution of language resources and technologies”.  The Prize is shared with Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). The META-NET Prize is awarded by the META-NET Technology Council, a 30 members committee from HLT R&D and industry executives and managers.


*** About ELRA ***
The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a world-wide leading player in language resource distribution, sharing and production. ELRA provides services to the language communities related to distribution and production of resources, including production on demand, technology evaluation and benchmarking. ELRA organizes LREC, the major international conference devoted to language resources and evaluation, with over 1,200 attendees from academia and industry. The next LREC edition will be held in Istanbul in 2012.
To find out more about ELRA, please visit our web site: http://www.elra.info


*** About Meta ***
META, the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance brings together researchers, commercial technology providers, private and corporate language technology users, language professionals and other information society stakeholders.
To find out more about META, please visit the web site: http://www.meta-net.eu

Contact : Helene Mazo, mazo@elda.org

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