'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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 Albert Di Cristo: « La Prosodie de la Parole : Une Introduction », Editions de Boeck-Solal (296 p). 

Sommaire : 

Avant –propos, Introduction, ;

 Ch.1 : Eléments de définition ; 

 Ch 2. Situation de la prosodie dans le champ des sciences du langage et dans l’étude de la communication ; 

Ch 3. La prosodie sur les deux versants de la communication orale interindividuelle (production et compréhension) ; 

Ch 4. La prosodie et le cerveau ;

 Ch 5. La matérialité de la prosodie ; 

Ch 6. Les niveau d’analyse et de représentation de la prosodie ; 

Ch 7. Les théories, les modèles de la prosodie et leurs appareils formels ;

 Ch 8 La fonctionnalité plurielle de la prosodie ; 

Ch 9. Les relations de la prosodie avec les sens ; 

Epilogue. 

Suggestions de lecture ;

 Index des termes ; 

Index des noms propres.

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 *****************************************************************
    ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update  September 2013
    *****************************************************************

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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:

Fall 2013 LDC Data             Scholarship Recipients

New           publications:

GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast News Speech

GALE             Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast News Transcripts

OntoNotes
            Release 5.0

Fall 2013 LDC Data           Scholarship Recipients
       

LDC is pleased to announce the         student recipients of the Fall 2013 LDC
          Data Scholarship program!          This program provides university and college students with         access to LDC data at no-cost. Students were asked to complete         an application which consisted of a proposal describing their         intended use of the data, as well as a letter of support from         their thesis adviser. We received many solid applications and         have chosen six  proposals
        to support.   The following students will receive no-cost copies         of LDC data:

     

Shamama Afnan - Clemson           University (USA), MS candidate, Electrical Engineering.            Shamana has been awarded a copy of 2008 NIST Speaker           Recognition Training and Test data for her work in speaker           recognition.

     

Seyedeh Firoozabadi -           University of Connecticut (USA), PhD candidate, Biomedical           Engineering.  Seyedeh has been awarded a copy of TIDIGITS and           TI-46 Word for her work in speech recognition.

     

Lei Liu - Beijing Foreign           Studies University (China), PhD candidate, Foreign Language           Education.  Lei has been awarded a copy of Treebank-3 and           Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank 2.0 for his work in           parsing.

     

Monisankha Pal - Indian           Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (India), PhD candidate,           Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering.            Monisankha has been awarded a copy of CSR-I (WSJ0) and CSR-II           (WSJ1) for his work in speaker recognition.

     

Sachin Pawar - Indian           Institute of Technology, Bombay (India), PhD candidate,           Computer Science and Engineering.  Sachin has been awarded a           copy of ACE 2004 Multilingual Training Corpus for his work in           named-entity recognition.

     

Sergio Silva - Federal           University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), MS candidate,           Computer Science.  Sergio has been awarded a copy of 2004 and           2005 Spring NIST Rich Transcription data for his work in           diarization.

   

New           publications

(1) GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast           News Speech was developed by LDC and is         comprised of approximately 126 hours of Mandarin Chinese         broadcast news speech collected in 2006 and 2007 by the         Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and Hong University of Science         and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, during Phase 2 of the DARPA         GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program.

Corresponding
        transcripts are released as GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast News         Transcripts (LDC2013T20).

Broadcast         audio for the GALE program was collected at LDC's Philadelphia,         PA USA facilities and at three remote collection sites: HKUST         (Chinese), Medianet (Tunis, Tunisia) (Arabic), and MTC (Rabat,         Morocco) (Arabic). The combined local and outsourced broadcast         collection supported GALE at a rate of approximately 300 hours         per week of programming from more than 50 broadcast sources for         a total of over 30,000 hours of collected broadcast audio over         the life of the program.

The         broadcast conversation recordings in this release feature news         broadcasts focusing principally on current events from the         following sources: Anhui TV, a regional television station in         Mainland China, Anhui Province; China Central TV (CCTV), a         national and international broadcaster in Mainland China; and         Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong-based satellite television station.

This         release contains 248 audio files presented in FLAC-compressed Waveform Audio File format (.flac),         16000 Hz single-channel 16-bit PCM. Each file was audited by a         native Chinese speaker following Audit Procedure Specification         Version 2.0 which is included in this release. The broadcast         auditing process served three principal goals: as a check on the         operation of the broadcast collection system equipment by         identifying failed, incomplete or faulty recordings, as an         indicator of broadcast schedule changes by identifying instances         when the incorrect program was recorded, and as a guide for data         selection by retaining information about a program's genre, data         type and topic.

GALE Phase         2 Chinese Broadcast News Speech is         distributed on 2 DVD-ROM.

2013         Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of         this data. 2013 Standard Members may request a copy as part of         their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this         data for US$2000.
     

                                                                                                                                    *
     

(2) GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast           News Transcripts was developed by LDC and contains         transcriptions of approximately 110 hours of Chinese broadcast         news speech collected in 2006 and 2007 by LDC and Hong         University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, during         Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language         Exploitation) Program.

Corresponding
        audio data is released as GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast News         Speech (LDC2013S08).

The         transcript files are in plain-text, tab-delimited format (TDF)         with UTF-8 encoding, and the transcribed data totals 1,593,049         tokens. The transcripts were created with the LDC-developed         transcription tool, XTrans, a multi-platform, multilingual, multi-channel         transcription tool that supports manual transcription and         annotation of audio recordings. 

The files         in this corpus were transcribed by LDC staff and/or by         transcription vendors under contract to LDC. Transcribers         followed LDC’s quick transcription guidelines (QTR) and quick         rich transcription specification (QRTR) both of which are         included in the documentation with this release. QTR         transcription consists of quick (near-)verbatim, time-aligned         transcripts plus speaker identification with minimal additional         mark-up. It does not include sentence unit annotation. QRTR         annotation adds structural information such as topic boundaries         and manual sentence unit annotation to the core components of a         quick transcript.

GALE Phase         2 Chinese Broadcast News Transcripts is distributed via web         download.

2013         Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of         this data. 2013 Standard Members may request a copy as part of         their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this         data for US$2000.
     

                                                                                                                        *
     

      (3) OntoNotes Release 5.0 is the final release of the         OntoNotes project, a collaborative effort between BBN Technologies, the University of Colorado, the University of           Pennsylvania and the University of Southern           Californias Information Sciences Institute. The goal         of the project was to annotate a large corpus comprising various         genres of text (news, conversational telephone speech, weblogs,         usenet newsgroups, broadcast, talk shows) in three languages         (English, Chinese, and Arabic) with structural information         (syntax and predicate argument structure) and shallow semantics         (word sense linked to an ontology and coreference).

OntoNotes         Release 5.0 contains the content of earlier releases --         OntoNotes Release 1.0 LDC2007T21, OntoNotes Release 2.0 LDC2008T04, OntoNotes Release 3.0 LDC2009T24 and OntoNotes Release 4.0 LDC2011T03 -- and adds source data from and/or additional         annotations for, newswire (News), broadcast news (BN), broadcast         conversation (BC), telephone conversation (Tele) and web data         (Web) in English and Chinese and newswire data in Arabic. Also         contained is English pivot text (Old Testament and New Testament         text). This cumulative publication consists of 2.9 million words        

The         OntoNotes project built on two time-tested resources, following         the Penn Treebank for syntax and the Penn PropBank for predicate-argument structure. Its semantic         representation includes word sense disambiguation for nouns and         verbs, with some word senses connected to an ontology, and         coreference.

Documents         describing the annotation guidelines and the routines for         deriving various views of the data from the database are         included in the documentation directory of this release. The         annotation is provided both in separate text files for each         annotation layer (Treebank, PropBank, word sense, etc.) and in         the form of an integrated relational database         (ontonotes-v5.0.sql.gz) with a Python API to provide convenient         cross-layer access.

OntoNotes         Release 5.0 is distributed on 1 DVD-ROM.

2013         Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of         this data. 2013 Standard Members may request a copy as part of         their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may request this         data by completing a copy of the LDC User Agreement for           Non-Members.  The agreement can be faxed +1         215 573 2175 or scanned and emailed to this address.  This data         is available at no charge, but is subject to non-member shipping         and handling fees.

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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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We are happy to announce the release of DEMAND, a set of real-world
16-channel noise recordings designed for the evaluation of microphone
array processing techniques.

http://www.irisa.fr/metiss/DEMAND/

1.5 h of noise data were recorded in 18 different indoor and outdoor
environments and are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Joachim Thiemann (CNRS - IRISA)
Nobutaka Ito (University of Tokyo)
Emmanuel Vincent (Inria Nancy - Grand Est)

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Aide à la finalisation de corpus oraux ou multimodaux pour diffusion, valorisation et dépôt pérenne

Le consortium IRCOM de la TGIR Corpus et l’EquipEx ORTOLANG s’associent pour proposer une aide technique et financière à la finalisation de corpus de données orales ou multimodales à des fins de diffusion et pérennisation par l’intermédiaire de l’EquipEx ORTOLANG. Cet appel ne concerne pas la création de nouveaux corpus mais la finalisation de corpus existants et non-disponibles de manière électronique. Par finalisation, nous entendons le dépôt auprès d’un entrepôt numérique public, et l’entrée dans un circuit d’archivage pérenne. De cette façon, les données de parole qui ont été enrichies par vos recherches vont pouvoir être réutilisées, citées et enrichies à leur tour de manière cumulative pour permettre le développement de nouvelles connaissances, selon les conditions d’utilisation que vous choisirez (sélection de licences d’utilisation correspondant à chacun des corpus déposés).

Cet appel d’offre est soumis à plusieurs conditions (voir ci-dessous) et l’aide financière par projet est limitée à 3000 euros. Les demandes seront traitées dans l’ordre où elles seront reçues par l’ IRCOM. Les demandes émanant d’EA ou de petites équipes ne disposant pas de support technique « corpus » seront traitées prioritairement. Les demandes sont à déposer du 1^er septembre 2013 au 31 octobre 2013. La décision de financement relèvera du comité de pilotage d’IRCOM. Les demandes non traitées en 2013 sont susceptibles de l’être en 2014. Si vous avez des doutes quant à l’éligibilité de votre projet, n’hésitez pas à nous contacter pour que nous puissions étudier votre demande et adapter nos offres futures.

Pour palier la grande disparité dans les niveaux de compétences informatiques des personnes et groupes de travail produisant des corpus, L’ IRCOM propose une aide personnalisée à la finalisation de corpus. Celle-ci sera réalisée par un ingénieur IRCOM en fonction des demandes formulées et adaptées aux types de besoin, qu’ils soient techniques ou financiers.

Les conditions nécessaires pour proposer un corpus à finaliser et obtenir une aide d’IRCOM sont :

• Pouvoir prendre toutes décisions concernant l’utilisation et la diffusion du corpus (propriété intellectuelle en particulier).

• Disposer de toutes les informations concernant les sources des corpus et le consentement des personnes enregistrées ou filmées.

• Accorder un droit d’utilisation libre des données ou au minimum un accès libre pour la recherche scientifique.

Les demandes peuvent concerner tout type de traitement : traitements de corpus quasi-finalisés (conversion, anonymisation), alignement de corpus déjà transcrits, conversion depuis des formats « traitement de textes », digitalisation de support ancien. Pour toute demande exigeant une intervention manuelle importante, les demandeurs devront s’investir en moyens humains ou financiers à la hauteur des moyens fournis par IRCOM et ORTOLANG.

IRCOM est conscient du caractère exceptionnel et exploratoire de cette démarche. Il convient également de rappeler que ce financement est réservé aux corpus déjà largement constitués et ne peuvent intervenir sur des créations ex-nihilo. Pour ces raisons de limitation de moyens, les propositions de corpus les plus avancés dans leur réalisation pourront être traitées en priorité, en accord avec le CP d’IRCOM. Il n’y a toutefois pas de limite « théorique » aux demandes pouvant être faites, IRCOM ayant la possibilité de rediriger les demandes qui ne relèvent pas de ses compétences vers d’autres interlocuteurs.

Les propositions de réponse à cet appel d’offre sont à envoyer à ircom.appel.corpus@gmail.com. Les propositions doivent utiliser le formulaire de deux pages figurant ci-dessous. Dans tous les cas, une réponse personnalisée sera renvoyée par IRCOM.

Ces propositions doivent présenter les corpus proposés, les données sur les droits d’utilisation et de propriétés et sur la nature des formats ou support utilisés.

Cet appel est organisé sous la responsabilité d’IRCOM avec la participation financière conjointe de IRCOM et l’EquipEx ORTOLANG.

Pour toute information complémentaire, nous rappelons que le site web de l'Ircom (http://ircom.corpus-ir.fr) est ouvert et propose des ressources à la communauté : glossaire, inventaire des unités et des corpus, ressources logicielles (tutoriaux, comparatifs, outils de conversion), activités des groupes de travail, actualités des formations, ...

L'IRCOM invite les unités à inventorier leur corpus oraux et multimodaux - 70 projets déjà recensés - pour avoir une meilleure visibilité des ressources déjà disponibles même si elles ne sont pas toutes finalisées.

Le comité de pilotage IRCOM

Utiliser ce formulaire pour répondre à l’appel : Merci.

Réponse à l’appel à la finalisation de corpus oral ou multimodal

Nom du corpus :

Nom de la personne à contacter :

Adresse email :

Numéro de téléphone :

Nature des données de corpus :

Existe-t’il des enregistrements :

Quel média ? Audio, vidéo, autre…

Quelle est la longueur totale des enregistrements ? Nombre de cassettes, nombre d’heures, etc.

Quel type de support ?

Quel format (si connu) ?

Existe-t’il des transcriptions :

Quel format ? (papier, traitement de texte, logiciel de transcription)

Quelle quantité (en heures, nombre de mots, ou nombre de transcriptions) ?

Disposez vous de métadonnées (présentation des droits d’auteurs et d’usage) ?

Disposez-vous d’une description précise des personnes enregistrées ?

Disposez-vous d’une attestation de consentement éclairé pour les personnes ayant été enregistrées ? En quelle année (environ) les enregistrements ont eu lieu ?

Quelle est la langue des enregistrements ?

Le corpus comprend-il des enregistrements d’enfants ou de personnes ayant un trouble du langage ou une pathologie ?

Si oui, de quelle population s’agit-il ?

Dans un souci d’efficacité et pour vous conseiller dans les meilleurs délais, il nous faut disposer d’exemples des transcriptions ou des enregistrements en votre possession. Nous vous contacterons à ce sujet, mais vous pouvez d’ores et déjà nous adresser par courrier électronique un exemple des données dont vous disposez (transcriptions, métadonnées, adresse de page web contenant les enregistrements).

Nous vous remercions par avance de l’intérêt que vous porterez à notre proposition. Pour toutes informations complémentaires veuillez contacter Martine Toda martine.toda@ling.cnrs.fr ou à ircom.appel.corpus@gmail.com.

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Rhapsodie: un Treebank prosodique et syntaxique de français parlé

Nous avons le plaisir d'annoncer que la ressource Rhapsodie, Corpus de français parlé annoté pour la prosodie et la syntaxe, est désormais disponible sur http://www.projet-rhapsodie.fr/

Le treebank Rhapsodie est composé de 57 échantillons sonores (5 minutes en moyenne, au total 3h de parole, 33000 mots) dotés d’une transcription orthographique et phonétique alignées au son.

Il s'agit d’une ressource de français parlé multi genres (parole privée et publique ; monologues et dialogues ; entretiens en face à face vs radiodiffusion, parole plus ou moins interactive et plus ou moins planifiée, séquences descriptives, argumentatives, oratoires et procédurales) articulée autour de sources externes (enregistrements extraits de projets antérieurs, en accord avec les concepteurs initiaux) et internes. Nous tenons en particulier à remercier les responsables des projets CFPP2000, PFC, ESLO, C-Prom ainsi que Mathieu Avanzi, Anne Lacheret, Piet Mertens et Nicolas Obin.

Les échantillons sonores (wave & MP3, pitch nettoyé et lissé), les transcriptions orthographiques (txt), les annotations macrosyntaxiques (txt), les annotations prosodiques (xml, textgrid) ainsi que les metadonnées (xml & html) sont téléchargeables librement selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’utilisation commerciale - Partage dans les mêmes conditions 3.0 France.

Les annotations microsyntaxiques seront disponibles prochainement

 Les métadonnées sont également explorables en ligne grâce à un browser.

 Les tutoriels pour la transcription, les annotations et les requêtes sont disponibles sur le site Rhapsodie.

 Enfin, L’annotation prosodique est interrogeable en ligne grâce au langage de requêtes Rhapsodie QL.

 L'équipe Ressource Rhapsodie (Modyco, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre)

Sylvain Kahane, Anne Lacheret, Paola Pietrandrea, Atanas Tchobanov, Arthur Truong.

 Partenaires : IRCAM (Paris), LATTICE (Paris), LPL (Aix-en-Provence), CLLE-ERSS (Toulouse).

********************************************************

Rhapsodie: a Prosodic and Syntactic Treebank for Spoken French

We are pleased to announce that Rhapsodie, a syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French created with the aim of modeling the interface between prosody, syntax and discourse in spoken French is now available at   http://www.projet-rhapsodie.fr/

The Rhapsodie treebank is made up of 57 short samples of spoken French (5 minutes long on average, amounting to 3 hours of speech and a 33 000 word corpus) endowed with an orthographical phoneme-aligned transcription . 

The corpus is representative of different genres (private and public speech; monologues and dialogues; face-to-face interviews and broadcasts; more or less interactive discourse; descriptive, argumentative and procedural samples, variations in planning type).

The corpus samples have been mainly drawn from existing corpora of spoken French and partially created within the frame of theRhapsodie project. We would especially like to thank the coordinators of the  CFPP2000, PFC, ESLO, C-Prom projects as well as Piet Mertens, Mathieu Avanzi, Anne Lacheret and Nicolas Obin.

The sound samples (waves, MP3, cleaned and stylized pitch), the orthographic transcriptions (txt), the macrosyntactic annotations (txt), the prosodic annotations  (xml, textgrid) as well as the metadata (xml and html) can be freely downloaded under the terms of the Creative Commons licence Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 France.

Microsyntactic annotation will be available soon.

The metadata are  searchable on line through a browser.

The prosodic annotation can be explored on line through the Rhapsodie Query Language.

The tutorials of transcription, annotations and Rhapsodie Query Language  are available on the site.

The Rhapsodie team (Modyco, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre :

Sylvain Kahane, Anne Lacheret, Paola Pietrandrea, Atanas Tchobanov, Arthur Truong.

Partners: IRCAM (Paris), LATTICE (Paris), LPL (Aix-en-Provence),CLLE-ERSS (Toulouse).

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We have created and made publicly available a dense audio-visual person-oriented ground-truth annotation of a feature movie (100 minutes long): “Hannah and her sisters” by Woody Allen.

The annotation includes

•          Face tracks in video (densely annotated, i.e., in each frame, and person-labeled)

•             Speech segments in audio (person-labeled)

•             Shot boundaries in video



The annotation can be useful for evaluating



•   Person-oriented video-based tasks (e.g., face tracking, automatic character naming, etc.)

•             Person-oriented audio-based tasks (e.g., speaker diarization or recognition)

•             Person-oriented multimodal-based tasks (e.g., audio-visual character naming)



Detail on Hannah dataset and access to it can be obtained there:

https://research.technicolor.com/rennes/hannah-home/

https://research.technicolor.com/rennes/hannah-download/



Acknowledgments:

This work is supported by AXES EU project: http://www.axes-project.eu/










Alexey Ozerov Alexey.Ozerov@technicolor.com

Jean-Ronan Vigouroux,

Louis Chevallier

Patrick Pérez

Technicolor Research & Innovation



 

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Text to         Speech Synthesis:
      over an hour of speech       synthesis samples from         1968 to 2001 by       25 French, Canadian, US , Belgian,       Swedish, Swiss systems
     
      33 ans de synthèse de la parole à         partir du texte: une promenade sonore (1968-2001)
        (33 years of Text to Speech Synthesis       in French : an audio tour (1968-2001)       )
      Christophe d'Alessandro
      Article published in         Volume 42 - No. 1/2001 issue of  Traitement       Automatique des Langues  (TAL,       Editions Hermes),         pp. 297-321.
     
      posted to:
      http://groupeaa.limsi.fr/corpus:synthese:start

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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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    The release 1.2.0 of the Bob
      signal-processing and machine learning toolbox is available .
    Bob provides both efficient implementations of several machine     learning algorithms as well as a framework to help researchers to     publish reproducible research.
   
   

   
    The previous release of Bob was providing:
    * image, video and audio IO
      interfaces such as jpg, avi, wav, 
    * database
      accessors such as FRGC, Labelled Face in the Wild, and many     others,
    *       image processing: Local Binary Patterns (LBPs), Gabor Jets,     SIFT,
    * machines
      and trainers such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs), k-Means,     Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), Inter-Session Variability modeling     (ISV), Joint Factor Analysis (JFA), Probabilistic Linear     Discriminant Analysis (PLDA), Bayesian intra/extra (personal)     classifier,
   
    The new release of Bob has brought the following features and/or     improvements, such as:
    * Unified implementation of Local Binary Patterns (LBPs),
    * Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) implementation,
    * Total variability (i-vector) implementation,
    * Conjugate gradient based-implementation for logistic regression,
    * Improved multi-layer perceptrons implementation (Back-propagation     can now be easily used in combination with any optimizer -- i.e     L-BFGS),
    * Pseudo-inverse-based method for Linear Discriminant Analysis,
    * Covariance-based method for Principal Component Analysis,
    * Whitening and within-class covariance normalization techniques,
    * Module for object detection and keypoint localization     (bob.visioner),
    * Module for       audio processing including feature extraction such as LFCC and     MFCC,
    * Improved extensions (satellite packages), that now support both     Python and C++ code, within an easy to use framework,
    * Improved documentation and add new tutorials,
    * Support for Intel's MKL (in addition to ATLAS),
    * Extend supported platforms (Arch Linux).
   
    This release represents a major milestone in Bob with plenty of     functionality improvements (>640       commits in total) and plenty of bug
      fixes.
    • Sources and       Documentation
    • Binary packages:
    •     Ubuntu: 10.04, 12.04, 12.10 and 13.04
    • For     Mac OSX: works with 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion) and 10.8     (Mountain Lion)
   
    For instructions on how to install pre-packaged version on Ubuntu or     OSX, consult our quick       installation instructions  (N.B. OS X macport has not yet been     upgraded. This will be done very soon. cf. https://trac.macports.org/ticket/39831 ).
   
   
    Best regards,
    Elie Khoury (on Behalf of the Biometric
      Group at Idiap lead by Sebastien
      Marcel)
   
     
     ---    

-- ------------------- Dr. Elie Khoury Post Doctorant Biometric Person Recognition Group IDIAP Research Institute (Switzerland) Tel : +41 27 721 77 23

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