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  November  2013
    *****************************************************************
We are happy to announce that 2 new Pronunciation Dictionaries from     the GlobalPhone database (Chinese-Mandarin and Korean) are now     available in our catalogue. 
   
    The GlobalPhone Pronunciation Dictionaries:     GlobalPhone is a multilingual speech and text database collected at     Karlsruhe University, Germany. The GlobalPhone pronunciation     dictionaries contain the pronunciations of all word forms found in     the transcription data of the GlobalPhone speech & text     database. The pronunciation dictionaries are currently available in     17 languages: Arabic (29230 entries/27059 words), Bulgarian (20193     entries), Croatian (23497 entries/20628 words), Czech (33049     entries/32942 words), French (36837 entries/20710 words), German     (48979 entries/46035 words), Hausa (42662 entries/42079 words),     Japanese (18094 entries), Polish (36484 entries), Portuguese     (Brazilian) (54146 entries/54130 words), Russian (28818     entries/27667 words), Spanish (Latin American) (43264 entries/33960     words), Swedish (about 25000 entries), Turkish (31330 entries/31087     words), Vietnamese (38504 entries/29974 words), Chinese-Mandarin     (73388 pronunciations), and Korean (3500 syllables).
   
    Special prices are offered for a combined purchase of several     GlobalPhone languages.
   
    Available GlobalPhone Pronuncation Dictionaries are listed below     (click on the links for further details):
    ELRA-S0340 GlobalPhone French Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1197
    ELRA-S0341 GlobalPhone German Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1198
    ELRA-S0348 GlobalPhone Japanese Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1199
    ELRA-S0350 GlobalPhone Arabic Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1200
    ELRA-S0351 GlobalPhone Bulgarian Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1201
    ELRA-S0352 GlobalPhone Czech Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1202
    ELRA-S0353 GlobalPhone Hausa Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1203
    ELRA-S0354 GlobalPhone Polish Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1204
    ELRA-S0355 GlobalPhone Portuguese (Brazilian) Pronunciation       Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1205
    ELRA-S0356 GlobalPhone Swedish Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1206
    ELRA-S0358 GlobalPhone Croatian Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1207
      ELRA-S0359 GlobalPhone Russian Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1208
      ELRA-S0360 GlobalPhone Spanish (Latin American) Pronunciation         Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1209
      ELRA-S0361 GlobalPhone Turkish Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1210
      ELRA-S0362 GlobalPhone Vietnamese Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1211
     
         *** NEW ***
       
      ELRA-S0363 GlobalPhone Chinese-Mandarin Pronunciation       Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1212
    ELRA-S0364 GlobalPhone Korean Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1213
   
    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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Invitation to
            Join for Membership Year (MY) 2014
       
      Membership Year (MY)         2014 is open for joining!  We would like to invite all current         and previous members of LDC to renew their membership as well as         welcome new organizations to join the Consortium.  For MY2014, LDC is pleased to         maintain membership fees at last year’s rates – membership fees         will not increase.  Additionally, LDC will extend discounts on         membership fees to members who keep their membership current and         who join early in the year.
       
        The details of our early renewal discounts for MY2014 are as         follows:
       
        ·         Organizations who joined for MY2013 will receive a 5%         discount when renewing. This discount will apply throughout         2014, regardless of time of renewal. MY2013 members renewing         before Monday, March 3, 2014 will receive an additional 5%         discount, for a total 10% discount off the membership fee.
       
        ·         New members as well as organizations who did not join         for MY2013, but who held membership in any of the previous MYs         (1993-2012), will also be eligible for a 5% discount provided         that they join/renew before March 3, 2014.
       
        The following table provides exact pricing information.
       
         

        *  For new members, MY2013 Members renewing for MY2014, and any         previous year Member who renews before March 3, 2014
       
        ** For MY2013 Members renewing before March 3, 2014
       
       
        Publications for MY2014 are still being planned; here are the         working titles of data sets we intend to provide:
       
       
       

     
        In addition to receiving new publications, current year members         of  LDC also enjoy the         benefit of licensing older data at reduced costs; current year         for-profit members may use most data for commercial         applications.

     
      Spring 2014
            LDC Data Scholarship Program
         
          Applications
            are now being accepted through Wednesday, January 15, 2014,             11:59PM EST for the Spring 20143 LDC Data Scholarship             program! The LDC Data Scholarship program provides             university students with access to LDC data at no-cost.             During previous program cycles, LDC has awarded no-cost             copies of LDC data to over 35 individual students and             student research groups.
         
          This             program is open to students pursuing both undergraduate and             graduate studies in an accredited college or university. LDC             Data Scholarships are not restricted to any particular field             of study; however, students must demonstrate a             well-developed research agenda and a bona fide inability to             pay. The selection process is highly competitive.
         
          The             application consists of two parts:
         
          (1) Data             Use Proposal. Applicants must submit a proposal describing             their intended use of the data. The proposal should state             which data the student plans to use and how the data will             benefit their research project as well as information on the             proposed methodology or algorithm.
         
          Applicants             should consult the LDC  Catalog for a complete list of data           distributed by LDC. Due to certain restrictions, a handful of           LDC corpora are restricted to members of the Consortium.           Applicants are advised to select a maximum of one to two           datasets; students may apply for additional datasets during           the following cycle once they have completed processing of the           initial datasets and publish or present work in some juried           venue.
         
          (2) Letter             of Support. Applicants must submit one letter of support             from their thesis adviser or department chair. The letter             must verify the student's need for data and confirm that the             department or university lacks the funding to pay the full             Non-member Fee for the data or to join the Consortium.          
         
          For             further information on application materials and program             rules, please visit the LDC Data Scholarship page.
         
          Students can email             their applications to the LDC             Data Scholarship program.           Decisions will be sent by email from the same address.
         
          The             deadline for the Spring 2014 program cycle is January 15,             2014, 11:59PM EST.
           
         
        LDC
          to Close for Thanksgiving Break
       
        LDC will be closed on Thursday, November 28, 2013 and Friday,         November 29, 2013 in observance of the US Thanksgiving Holiday.          Our offices will reopen on Monday, December 2, 2013.
       
       

        New publications
       
      (1)
      Chinese Treebank 8.0 consists of         approximately 1.5 million words of annotated and parsed text         from Chinese newswire, government documents, magazine articles,         various broadcast news and broadcast conversation programs, web         newsgroups and weblogs.

The
        Chinese Treebank project began at the University of Pennsylvania         in 1998, continued at the University of Colorado and then moved         to Brandeis University. The project’s goal is         to provide a large, part-of-speech tagged and fully bracketed         Chinese language corpus. The first delivery, Chinese Treebank         1.0, contained 100,000 syntactically annotated words from Xinhua         News Agency newswire. It was later corrected and released in         2001 as Chinese Treebank 2.0           (LDC2001T11) and consisted of         approximately 100,000 words. The LDC released Chinese Treebank 4.0           (LDC2004T05), an updated version         containing roughly 400,000 words, in 2004. A year later, LDC         published the 500,000 word Chinese Treebank 5.0           (LDC2005T01). Chinese Treebank 6.0           (LDC2007T36), released in 2007,         consisted of 780,000 words. Chinese Treebank 7.0           (LDC2010T08), released in 2010,         added new annotated newswire data, broadcast material and web         text to the approximate total of one million words. Chinese         Treebank 8.0 adds new annotated data from newswire, magazine         articles and government documents.

There
        are 3,007 text files in this release, containing 71,369         sentences, 1,620,561 words, 2,589,848 characters (hanzi or         foreign). The data is provided in UTF-8 encoding, and the         annotation has Penn Treebank-style labeled brackets. Details of         the annotation standard can be found in the  segmentation, POS-tagging and         bracketing guidelines included in the release. The data is         provided in four different formats: raw text, word segmented,         POS-tagged, and syntactically bracketed formats. All files were         automatically verified and manually checked.

Chinese
        Treebank 8.0 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$300.
       
       
       

*
       
       

      (2)
      CSC Deceptive Speech was developed by         Columbia University, SRI International and University of         Colorado Boulder. It consists of 32 hours of audio interview         from 32 native speakers of Standard American English (16 male,         16 female) recruited from the Columbia University student         population and the community. The purpose of the study was to         distinguish deceptive speech from non-deceptive speech using         machine learning techniques on extracted features from the         corpus.

The
        participants were told that they were participating in a         communication experiment which sought to identify people who fit         the profile of the top entrepreneurs in America. To this end,         the participants performed tasks and answered questions in six         areas. Tthey were later told that they had received low scores         in some of those areas and did not fit the profile. The subjects         then participated in an interview where they were told to         convince the interviewer that they had actually achieved high         scores in all areas and that they did indeed fit the profile.         The task of the interviewer was to determine how he thought the         subjects had actually performed, and he was allowed to ask them         any questions other than those that were part of the performed         tasks. For each question from the interviewer, subjects were         asked to indicate whether the reply was true or contained any         false information by pressing one of two pedals hidden from the         interviewer under a table.

Interviews
        were conducted in a double-walled sound booth and recorded to         digital audio tape on two channels using Crown CM311A Differoid         headworn close-talking microphones, then down sampled to 16kHz         before processing.

The
        interviews were orthographically transcribed by hand using the         NIST EARS transcription guidelines. Labels for local lies were         obtained automatically from the pedal-press data and         hand-corrected for alignment, and labels for global lies were         annotated during transcription based on the known scores of the         subjects versus their reported scores. The orthographic         transcription was force-aligned using the SRI telephone speech         recognizer adapted for full-bandwidth recordings. There are         several segmentations associated with the corpus: the implicit         segmentation of the pedal presses, derived semi-automatically         sentence-like units (EARS SLASH-UNITS or SUs) which were hand         labeled, intonational phrase units and the units corresponding         to each topic of the interview.

CSC
        Deceptive Speech is distributed on 1 DVD-ROM. 

2013
        Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of         this data  provided they have completed and returned the User License           Agreement for CSC Deceptive Speech (LDC2013S09). 2013 Standard Members may         request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.          Non-members may license this data for US$1000.

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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).

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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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