Speech and Audio Signal Processing: Processing and Perception of Speech and Music [2nd edition]  Ben Gold, Nelson Morgan, Dan Ellis

Digital copy:  http://www.amazon.com/Speech-Audio-Signal-Processing-Perception/dp/product-description/1118142888

Hardcopy available: http://www.amazon.com/Speech-Audio-Signal-Processing-Perception/dp/0470195363/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319142964&sr=1-1

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Instrumental Studies in Arabic Phonetics
Edited by Zeki Majeed Hassan and Barry Heselwood
University of Gothenburg / University of Leeds
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 319] 2011. xii, 365 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Hardbound – Available
ISBN 978 90 272 4837 4 | EUR 110.00 | USD 165.00
e-Book – Forthcoming Ordering information
ISBN 978 90 272 8322 1 | EUR 110.00 | USD 165.00
Brought together in this volume are fourteen studies using a range of modern instrumental methods – acoustic and articulatory – to investigate the phonetics of several North African and Middle Eastern varieties of Arabic. Topics covered include syllable structure, quantity, assimilation, guttural and emphatic consonants and their pharyngeal and laryngeal mechanisms, intonation, and language acquisition. In addition to presenting new data and new descriptions and interpretations, a key aim of the volume is to demonstrate the depth of objective analysis that instrumental methods can enable researchers to achieve. A special feature of many chapters is the use of more than one type of instrumentation to give different perspectives on phonetic properties of Arabic speech which have fascinated scholars since medieval times. The volume will be of interest to phoneticians, phonologists and Arabic dialectologists, and provides a link between traditional qualitative accounts of spoken Arabic and modern quantitative methods of instrumental phonetic analysis.

Acknowledgements  vii – viii
List of contributors  ix – x
Transliteration and transcription symbols for Arabic  xi – xii
Introduction
Barry Heselwood and Zeki Majeed Hassan 1 – 26
Part I. Issues in syntagmatic structure
Preliminary study of Moroccan Arabic word-initial consonant clusters and syllabification using electromagnetic articulography
Adamantios I. Gafos, Philip Hoole and Chakir Zeroual 27 – 46
An acoustic phonetic study of quantity and quantity complementarity in Swedish and Iraqi Arabic
Zeki Majeed Hassan 47 – 62
Assimilation of /l/ to /r/ in Syrian Arabic: An electropalatographic and acoustic study
Barry Heselwood, Sara Howard and Rawya Ranjous 63 – 98
Part II. Guttural consonants
A study of the laryngeal and pharyngeal consonants in Jordanian Arabic using nasoendoscopy, videofluoroscopy and spectrography
Barry Heselwood and Feda Al-Tamimi 99
A phonetic study of guttural laryngeals in Palestinian Arabic using laryngoscopic and acoustic analysis
Kimary N. Shahin 129 – 140
Airflow and acoustic modelling of pharyngeal and uvular consonants in Moroccan Arabic
Mohamed Yeou and Shinji Maeda 141 – 162
Part III. Emphasis and coronal consonants
Nasoendoscopic, videofluoroscopic and acoustic study of plain and emphatic coronals in Jordanian Arabic
Feda Al-Tamimi and Barry Heselwood 163 – 192
Acoustic and electromagnetic articulographic study of pharyngealisation: Coarticulatory effects as an index of stylistic and regional variation in Arabic
Mohamed Embarki, Slim Ouni, Mohamed Yeou, M. Christian Guilleminot and Sallal Al-Maqtari 193 – 216
Investigating the emphatic feature in Iraqi Arabic: Acoustic and articulatory evidence of coarticulation
Zeki Majeed Hassan and John H. Esling 217 – 234
Glottalisation and neutralisation in Yemeni Arabic and Mehri: An acoustic study
Janet C.E. Watson and Alex Bellem 235 – 256
The phonetics of localising uvularisation in Ammani-Jordanian Arabic: An acoustic study
Bushra Adnan Zawaydeh and Kenneth de Jong 257 – 276
EMA, endoscopic, ultrasound and acoustic study of two secondary articulations in Moroccan Arabic: Labial-velarisation vs. emphasis
Chakir Zeroual, John H. Esling and Philip Hoole 277 – 298
Part IV. Intonation and acquisition
Acoustic cues to focus and givenness in Egyptian Arabic
Sam Hellmuth 299 – 324
Acquisition of Lebanese Arabic and Yorkshire English /l/ by bilingual and monolingual children: A comparative spectrographic study
Ghada Khattab 325 – 354
Appendix: Phonetic instrumentation used in the studies  355 – 358

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'Audiovisual
Speech Processing' édité par G. Bailly, P. Perrier & E. Vatikiotis-Batesonn chez
Cambridge University Press ?

'When we speak, we configure the vocal tract which shapes the visible motions of the face
and the patterning of the audible speech acoustics. Similarly, we use these visible and
audible behaviors to perceive speech. This book showcases a broad range of research
investigating how these two types of signals are used in spoken communication, how they
interact, and how they can be used to enhance the realistic synthesis and recognition of
audible and visible speech. The volume begins by addressing two important questions about
human audiovisual performance: how auditory and visual signals combine to access the
mental lexicon and where in the brain this and related processes take place. It then
turns to the production and perception of multimodal speech and how structures are
coordinated within and across the two modalities. Finally, the book presents overviews
and recent developments in machine-based speech recognition and synthesis of AV speech. '

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Fuchs, Susanne / Weirich, Melanie / Pape, Daniel / Perrier, Pascal (eds.)

Speech Planning and Dynamics

Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2012. 277 pp., 50 fig., 8 tables

Speech Production and Perception. Vol. 1

Edited by Susanne Fuchs and Pascal Perrier

Imprimé :

ISBN 978-3-631-61479-2 hb.

SFR 60.00 / €* 52.95 / €** 54.50 / € 49.50 / £ 39.60 / US$ 64.95

eBook :

ISBN 978-3-653-01438-9

SFR 63.20 / €* 58.91 / €** 59.40 / € 49.50 / £ 39.60 / US$ 64.95

Commander en ligne : www.peterlang.com

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Odyssey Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop 2012, the workshop of ISCA SIG Speaker and Language Characterization, was held in Singapore on 25-28 June 2012. Odyssey 2012 is glad to announce that its video recordings have been included in the ISCA Video Archive. http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/archive/video-archive

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Techniques for Noise Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition
Tuomas Virtanen, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj (editors)
ISBN: 978-1-1199-7088-0
Publisher: Wiley

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are finding increasing use in everyday life. Many of the commonplace environments where the systems are used are noisy, for example users calling up a voice search system from a busy cafeteria or a street. This can result in degraded speech recordings and adversely affect the performance of speech recognition systems. As the use of ASR systems increases, knowledge of the state-of-the-art in techniques to deal with such problems becomes critical to system and application engineers and researchers who work with or on ASR technologies. This book presents a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art in techniques used to improve the robustness of speech recognition systems to these degrading external influences.

Key features:

*Reviews all the main noise robust ASR approaches, including signal separation, voice activity detection, robust feature extraction, model compensation and adaptation, missing data techniques and recognition of reverberant speech.
*Acts as a timely exposition of the topic in light of more widespread use in the future of ASR technology in challenging environments.
*Addresses robustness issues and signal degradation which are both key requirements for practitioners of ASR.
*Includes contributions from top ASR researchers from leading research units in the field

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Understanding Prosody: The Role of Context, Function and Communication

Ed. by Niebuhr, Oliver

Series:Language, Context and Cognition 13,   De Gruyter

http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/186201?format=G or http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=63238

The volume represents a state-of-the-art snapshot of the research on prosody for phoneticians, linguists and speech technologists. It covers well-known models and languages. How are prosodies linked to speech sounds? What are the relations between prosody and grammar? What does speech perception tell us about prosody, particularly about the constituting elements of intonation and rhythm? The papers of the volume address questions like these with a special focus on how the notion of context-based coding, the knowledge of prosodic functions and the communicative embedding of prosodic elements can advance our understanding of prosody.

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ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update *****************************************************************

ELRA is happy to announce that 4 new Written Corpora are now available in its catalogue.

ELRA-W0059 LT Corpus The LT Corpus is composed of 70 fiction texts from Portuguese renowned authors. The corpus contains 1,781,083 tokens. The texts date from before 1940. The corpus is delivered in one file, in two different formats. The txt version has one sentence per line, an identification number for each text and no further annotation. The cqpweb file is one token per line, followed by pos tag and lemma, and is annotated for NP chunks. For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1178

ELRA-W0060 PTPARL Corpus The PTPARL Corpus contains 1,076 texts consisting of adapted transcriptions of the Portuguese Parliament sessions. The corpus contains 1,000,441 tokens. The corpus is delivered in one file, in two different formats. The txt version has one sentence per line, an identification number for each text and no further annotation. The cqpweb file is one token per line, followed by pos tag and lemma, and is annotated for NP chunks.For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1179

ELRA-W0061 CINTIL-DependencyBank The CINTIL-DependencyBank (Silva and Branco, 2012) is a corpus of sentences annotated with their syntactic dependency graphs and grammatical function tags composed of 10,039 sentences and 110,166 tokens taken from different sources and domains: news (8,861 sentences; 101,430 tokens), novels (399 sentences; 3,082 tokens). In addition, there are 779 sentences (5,654 tokens) that are used for regression testing of the computational grammar that supported the annotation of the corpus. For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1180

 ELRA-W0062 CINTIL-DeepBank The CINTIL-DeepBank (Branco et al., 2010) is a corpus of sentences annotated with their full-fledged deep grammatical representations, composed of 10,039 sentences and 110,166 tokens taken from different sources and domains: news (8,861 sentences; 101,430 tokens), and novels (399 sentences; 3,082 tokens). In addition, there are 779 sentences (5,654 tokens) used for regression testing of the computational grammar that supported the annotation of the corpus.

For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1181 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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ELRA releases free Language Resources
***************************************************

Anticipating users’ expectations, ELRA has decided to offer a large number of resources for free for Academic research use. Such an offer consists of several sets of speech, text and multimodal resources that are regularly released, for free, as soon as legal aspects are cleared. A first set was released in May 2012 at the occasion of LREC 2012. A second set is now being released.

Whenever this is permitted by our licences, please feel free to use these resources for deriving new resources and depositing them with the ELRA catalogue for community re-use.

Over the last decade, ELRA has compiled a large list of resources into its Catalogue of LRs. ELRA has negotiated distribution rights with the LR owners and made such resources available under fair conditions and within a clear legal framework. Following this initiative, ELRA has also worked on LR discovery and identification with a dedicated team which investigated and listed existing and valuable resources in its 'Universal Catalogue', a list of resources that could be negotiated on a case-by-case basis. At LREC 2010, ELRA introduced the LRE Map, an inventory of LRs, whether developed or used, that were described in LREC papers. This huge inventory listed by the authors themselves constitutes the first 'community-built' catalogue of existing or emerging resources, constantly enriched and updated at major conferences.

Considering the latest trends on easing the sharing of LRs, from both legal and commercial points of view, ELRA is taking a major role in META-SHARE, a large European open infrastructure for sharing LRs. This infrastructure will allow LR owners, providers and distributors to distribute their LRs through an additional and cost-effective channel.

To obtain the available sets of LRs, please visit the web page below and follow the instructions given online:
http://www.elra.info/Free-LRs,26.html

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In this newsletter:

2013 LDC Podcast Available from LDC Blog

Membership Discounts for MY 2013 Still Available

Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0 Update - RTE data

New publications:

Chinese-English Biology and Chemistry Abstract Parallel Text

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Web Parallel Text

2013 LDC Podcast Available from LDC Blog

Kicking off the new year is the fourth podcast in our 20th Anniversary series featuring LDC Senior Researcher, Mohamed Maamouri.

Mohamed directs the Arabic Treebank group and spearheads the development of Arabic resources and projects. The latter includes the leading role in LDC’s collaboration with Georgetown University Press to develop updated versions of three dialectal Arabic dictionaries (Iraqi, Moroccan, Syrian). In this podcast, he reflects on his personal and professional experiences and comments on Arabic resource development at LDC.

Click here for Mohamed’s podcast.

Other podcasts will be published via the LDC Blog , so stay tuned to that space.

Membership Discounts for MY 2013 Still Available

If you are considering joining for Membership Year 2013 (MY2013), there is still time to save on membership fees.   Any organization which joins or renews membership for 2013 through Friday, March 1, 2013, is entitled to a 5% discount on membership fees.  Organizations which held membership for MY2012 can receive a 10% discount on fees provided they renew prior to March 1, 2013.  For further information on pricing, please consult our Announcements page or contact LDC.

    Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0 Update - RTE data

A Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) update is now available for Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0 LDC2008T05 (PDTB).  This data has been used to run the textual entailment experiments described in: Sara Tonelli and Elena Cabrio 'Hunting for Entailing Pairs in the Penn Discourse Treebank', in Proceedings of Coling 2012, Mumbay, India. The files contain Text - Hypothesis pairs in the standard RTE xml format (for more details, see  RTE Challenge at TAC 2011), which have been manually annotated as entailing or not entailing. All sentence pairs have been extracted from the Penn Discourse Treebank and are therefore connected by a discourse relation label.

The data are not included in the general release of Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0, but are freely available for download from the catalog page. 

New Publications

(1) Chinese-English Biology and Chemistry Abstract Parallel Text was developed by The MITRE Corporation. It consists of parallel sentences from a collection of chemistry and biology-related scientific article abstracts published in Mandarin and translated into English by translators with particular expertise in the technical area. Translators were instructed to err on the side of literal translation if required, but to maintain the technical writing style of the source and make the resulting English as natural as possible. The translators were given specific guidelines for translation, and those are included in this distribution.

This release contains 2,239 lines of parallel Mandarin and English, with a total of 156,445 characters of Mandarin and 75,515 words of English, presented in a separate UTF-8 plain text file for each language. The sentences were translated in sequential order and presented in scrambled order, such that parallel sentences at identical line numbers are translations. For example, the 31st line of the English file is a translation of the 31st line of the Mandarin file. The original line sequence is not provided.

Chinese-English Biology and Chemistry Abstract Parallel Text is distributed via web download.

2013 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data on disc.  2013 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for US$1500.

*

(2) GALE Phase 2 Arabic Web Parallel Text was developed by LDC. Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. This corpus contains Modern Standard Arabic source text and corresponding English translations selected from web data collected in 2007 by LDC and transcribed by LDC or under its direction. GALE Phase 2 Arabic Web Parallel Text includes 60 source-translation document pairs, comprising 42,089 words of Arabic source text and its English translation. Data was drawn from various Arabic weblog and newsgroup sources.

The files in this release were transcribed by LDC staff and/or transcription vendors under contract to LDC in accordance with the Quick Rich Transcription guidelines developed by LDC. Transcribers indicated sentence boundaries in addition to transcribing the text. Data was manually selected for translation according to several criteria, including linguistic features, transcription features and topic features. The transcribed and segmented files were then reformatted into a human-readable translation format and assigned to translation vendors. Translators followed LDC's Arabic to English translation guidelines. Bilingual LDC staff performed quality control procedures on the completed translations. Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format. TDF files are tab-delimited files containing one segment of text along with meta information about that segment.

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Web Parallel Text is distributed via web download.

2013 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data on disc.  2013 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for US$1750.

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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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I am pleased to announce you that we made a Matlab toolbox for glottal analysis now available on the web at:

http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/~drugman/Toolbox/

This toolbox includes the following modules:

- Pitch and voiced-unvoiced decision estimation

- Speech polarity detection

- Glottal Closure Instant determination

- Glottal flow estimation

By the way, I am also glad to send you my PhD thesis entitled “Glottal Analysis and its Applications”:

http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/~drugman/files/DrugmanPhDThesis.pdf

where you will find applications in speech synthesis, speaker recognition, voice pathology detection, and expressive speech analysis.

Hoping that this might be useful to you, and to see you soon,

Thomas Drugman

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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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