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 QUAERO Structured Named Entity     Language Resources are now available in its catalogue.
    A Written Corpus and a Broadcast Resource annotated with Structured     Named Entities from the QUAERO Programme are now being released     (free for academic research):
   
    ELRA-W0073 Quaero Old Press Extended Named Entity corpus
    This corpus consists of the manual annotation of 76 newspaper issues     published in 1890-1891 and provided by the French National Library     (Bibliothèque Nationale de France). Three different titles are used     (Le Temps, La Croix and Le Figaro) for a total of 295 pages. The     corpus is fully manually annotated according to the Quaero extended     and structured named entity definition.
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1194&language=en
   
    ELRA-S0349 Quaero Broadcast News Extended Named Entity corpus
    This corpus consists of the manual annotation of (i) the ESTER 2     (see also ELRA-S0338) manual transcription corpus and (ii) the     Quaero Speech Recognition Evaluation corpus (manual and automatic     transcriptions coming from 3 different ASR systems). The corpus is     fully manually annotated according to the Quaero extended and     structured named entity definition.
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1195&language=en
   
    These two corpora are described in :
    S. Rosset, C. Grouin, K. Fort, O. Galibert, J. Kahn, P. Zweigenbaum.     Structured Named Entities in two distinct press corpora:     Contemporary Broadcast News and Old Newspapers. In Proc. of LAW VI,     2012.
   
    QUAERO is a research and innovation program adressing automatic     processing of multimedia and multilingual content aiming at the     development of new tools for navigating in large volumes of text and     audiovisual content. The research and development undertaken covers     automatic information retrieval, analysis, segmentation and     classification of text, speech, music, image and video. The program,     supported by OSEO, gathers 32 French and German partners -- large     groups, small and medium size enterprises, research laboratories and     public organizations.  The program consists of a number of     application projects aiming at industrial targets and markets that     are supported by a common shared research  structure. Real world     data sets (corpora) are used to define the evaluation tasks and to     conduct the research challenges between partners. The use of     systematic periodic technology evaluation allows to assess progress     made and to  select the most promising technical and scientific     approaches. After nearly five years of existence, Quaero is a very     active eco-system that has produced in excess of 700 scientific     publications, more than 25 awards, numerous top 3 rankings  in     technology evaluation campaigns, 31 patent applications and many     innovative prototypes.
   
    To find out more about QUAERO, please visit the following website: http://www.quaero.org
   
    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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Reprint         of March 2013 Newsletter

LDC's March 2013 newsletter may not have       reached all intended recipients and is being reprinted below.

LDC’s 20th Anniversary:         Concluding a Year of Celebration

      We’ve enjoyed celebrating our 20th Anniversary this last year       (April 2012 - March 2013) and would like to review some highlights       before its close.
     
      Our 2012 User Survey, circulated early in 2012, included a special       Anniversary section in which respondents were asked to reflect on       their opinions of, and dealings with, LDC over the years. We were       humbled by the response. Multiple users mentioned that they would       not be able to conduct their research without LDC and its data.       For a full list of survey testimonials, please click here.
     
      LDC also developed its first-ever timeline        (initially published in the April 2012 Newsletter) marking       significant milestones in the consortium’s founding and growth.
     
      In September, we hosted a 20th Anniversary
        Workshop  that brought together many friends and       collaborators to discuss the present and future of language       resources.
     
      Throughout the year, we conducted several interviews of long-time       LDC staff members to document their unique recollections of LDC       history and to solicit their opinions on the future of the       Consortium. These interviews are available as podcasts on the LDC         Blog. 
     
      As our Anniversary year draws to a close, one task remains – to       thank all of LDC’s past, present and future members and other       friends of the Consortium for their loyalty and for their       contributions to the community. LDC would not exist if not for its       supporters.  The variety of relationships that LDC has built over       the years is a direct reflection of the vitality, strength and       diversity of the community. We thank you all and hope that we       continue to serve your needs in our third decade and beyond.
     
      For a last treat, please visit LDC’s newly-launched YouTube       channel to enjoy this video montage       of the LDC staff interviews featured in the podcast series.
     
      Thank you again for your continued support!

New publications

(1) 1993-2007 United
        Nations Parallel Text was developed by Google Research. It       consists of United Nations (UN) parliamentary documents from 1993       through 2007 in the official languages of the UN: Arabic, Chinese,       English, French, Russian, and Spanish.

UN parliamentary documents are available from       the UN Official Document System (UN         ODS). UN ODS, in its main UNDOC database, contains the full       text of all types of UN parliamentary documents. It has complete       coverage datng from 1993 and variable coverage before that.       Documents exist in one or more of the official languages of the       UN: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. UN ODS       also contains a large number of German documents, marked with the       language other, but these are not included in this dataset.

LDC has released parallel UN parliamentary       documents in English, French and Spanish spanning the period       1988-1993, UN Parallel
        Text (Complete) (LDC94T4A).

The data is presented as raw text and       word-aligned text. There are 673,670 raw text documents and       520,283 word aligned documents. The raw text is very close to what       was extracted from the original word processing documents in UN       ODS (e.g., Word, WordPerfect, PDF), converted to UTF-8 encoding.       The word-aligned text was normalized, tokenized, aligned at the       sentence-level, further broken into sub-sentential chunk-pairs,       and then aligned at the word. The sentence, chunk, and word       alignment operations were performed separately for each individual       language pair.

1993-2007 United Nations Parallel Text is       distributed on 3 DVD-ROM.

2013 Subscription Members will automatically       receive two copies of this data provided they have completed the UN         Parallel Text Corpus User Agreement.  2013 Standard Members       may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.        Non-members may license this data for US$175.

*

(2) GALE Chinese-English
        Word Alignment and Tagging Training Part 4 -- Web was       developed by LDC and contains 158,387 tokens of word aligned       Chinese and English parallel text enriched with linguistic tags.       This material was used as training data in the DARPA GALE       (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program.

Some approaches to statistical machine       translation include the incorporation of linguistic knowledge in       word aligned text as a means to improve automatic word alignment       and machine translation quality. This is accomplished with two       annotation schemes: alignment and tagging. Alignment identifies       minimum translation units and translation relations by using       minimum-match and attachment annotation approaches. A set of word       tags and alignment link tags are designed in the tagging scheme to       describe these translation units and relations. Tagging adds       contextual, syntactic and language-specific features to the       alignment annotation.

This release consists of Chinese source web       data (newsgroup, weblog) collected by LDC between 2005-2010. The       distribution by words, character tokens and segments appears       below:

      Note that all token counts are based on the Chinese data only. One       token is equivalent to one character and one word is equivalent to       1.5 characters.

The Chinese word alignment tasks consisted of       the following components:

Identifying, aligning, and tagging 8 different       types of links

Identifying, attaching, and tagging local-level       unmatched words

Identifying and tagging       sentence/discourse-level unmatched words

Identifying and tagging all instances of       Chinese 的(DE) except
      when they were a part of a semantic link.

GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging       Training Part 4 -- Web 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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