Title: Robust Speech Recognition of Uncertain or Missing Data
Editors: Dorothea Kolossa and Reinhold Haeb-Umbach
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2011
ISBN 978-3-642-21316-8
Link:
http://www.springer.com/engineering/signals/book/978-3-642-21316-8?detailsPage=authorsAndEditors

Automatic speech recognition suffers from a lack of robustness with
respect to noise, reverberation and interfering speech. The growing
field of speech recognition in the presence of missing or uncertain
input data seeks to ameliorate those problems by using not only a
preprocessed speech signal but also an estimate of its reliability to
selectively focus on those segments and features that are most reliable
for recognition. This book presents the state of the art in recognition
in the presence of uncertainty, offering examples that utilize
uncertainty information for noise robustness, reverberation robustness,
simultaneous recognition of multiple speech signals, and audiovisual
speech recognition.

The book is appropriate for scientists and researchers in the field of
speech recognition who will find an overview of the state of the art in
robust speech recognition, professionals working in speech recognition
who will find strategies for improving recognition results in various
conditions of mismatch, and lecturers of advanced courses on speech
processing or speech recognition who will find a reference and a
comprehensive introduction to the field. The book assumes an
understanding of the fundamentals of speech recognition using Hidden
Markov Models.

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LA COARTICULATION

Collection : Langue & Parole, L'Harmattan

Mohamed Embarki

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

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

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

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Actes vidéo des journées ERMITES 2011 'Décomposition Parcimonieuse, Contraction et Structuration pour l'Analyse de Scènes', sont en ligne sur :   http://glotin.univ-tln.fr/ERMITES11

On y retrouve (en .mpg) la vingtaine d'heure des conférences de :

Y. Bengio, Montréal
    «Apprentissage Non-Supervisé de Représentations Profondes »
     http://lsis.univ-tln.fr/~glotin/ERMITES_2011_Y_Bengio_1sur4.mp4 ...

S. Mallat, Paris
    « Scattering & Matching Pursuit for Acoustic Sources Separation »
     http://lsis.univ-tln.fr/~glotin/ERMITES_2011_Mallat_1sur3.mp4 ...

J.-P. Haton, Nancy
    « Analyse de Scène et Reconnaissance Stochastique de la Parole »
     http://lsis.univ-tln.fr/~glotin/ERMITES_2011_JP_Haton_1sur4.mp4 ...

M. Kowalski, Paris
    « Sparsity and structure for audio signal: a *-lasso therapy »
     http://lsis.univ-tln.fr/~glotin/ERMITES_2011_Kowalski_1sur5.mp4 ...

O. Adam, Paris
    « Estimation de Densité de Population de Baleines par Analyse de
leurs Chants »
     http://lsis.univ-tln.fr/~glotin/ERMITES_2011_Adam.mp4

X. Halkias, New-York
    « Detection and Tracking of Dolphin Vocalizations »
     http://lsis.univ-tln.fr/~glotin/ERMITES_2011_Halkias.mp4

J. Razik, Toulon
    « Sparse coding : from speech to whales »
     http://lsis.univ-tln.fr/~glotin/ERMITES_2011_Razik.mp4

H. Glotin, Toulon
   « Suivi & reconstruction du comportement de cétacés par acoustique passive »

ps : ERMITES 2012 portera sur la vision (Y. Lecun, Y. Thorpe, P.
Courrieu, M Perreira, M. Van Gerven,...)

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

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

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

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

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

Speech Planning and Dynamics

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

Speech Production and Perception. Vol. 1

Edited by Susanne Fuchs and Pascal Perrier

Imprimé :

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

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

eBook :

ISBN 978-3-653-01438-9

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

Commander en ligne : www.peterlang.com

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

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*****************************************************************
ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update
*****************************************************************
ELRA is happy to announce that 2 new Speech     Telephone Resources are now available in its catalogue.
    Moreover, an updated version of the Bilingual Collocational     Dictionary (Horst Bogatz) has also been released.     
   
    1) New Language Resources:
     
      ELRA-S0343 VERIF1DE
    The speech corpus VERIF1DE contains 20 recordings (sessions) of     150 German speakers each over the telephone network (10 sessions     over fixed network and 10 sessions over GSM). Each session contains  40 single recordings, mainly speech read from a prompt sheet.
   For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1169
   
    ELRA-S0344 LILA Hindi Belt database
    The LILA Hindi Belt database comprises 2,023 Hindi speakers     (1,011 males and 1,012 females, all speakers with Hindi as first     language) recorded over the Indian mobile telephone network. Each  speaker uttered 83 read and spontaneous items.
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1170
   
    2) Updated Language Resource:
     
    ELRA-M0013 Bilingual Collocational Dictionary (Horst Bogatz)
    This new release contains  69,000  English headwords (instead       of 40,000 for the previous release).
    The bilingual English-German collocational dictionary consists of     around 69,000 English headwords, including concepts expressed with     more than one word (e.g. 'the awareness of the environment' or 'lame     duck') and hyphenated compounds. It contains verbs, adjectives,     synonyms and phrases that collocate with the headword. It provides     the German equivalents for the headwords as well as their English     synonyms.
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=451
    
    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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In this newsletter:

-  The           Future of Language Resources: LDC 20th Anniversary Workshop           Summary  -

-  English
          Treebanking at LDC -
   

New publications

-  GALE           Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging Training Part 1 --           Newswire and Web  -

-  MADCAT         Phase 1 Training Set  -

The Future of Language         Resources: LDC 20th Anniversary Workshop Summary 

Thanks to the members,       friends and staff  who made       our 20th Anniversary Workshop (September 6-7) a fruitful and fun       experience. The speakers -- from academia, industry and government       – engaged participants and provoked discussion with their talks       about the ways in which language resources contribute to research       in language-related fields and other disciplines and with their       insights into the future. The result was much food for thought as       we enter our third decade.
   

Visit the workshop
        page for the proceedings and to learn more about the event.

English Treebanking at LDC
     

As part of our 20th anniversary celebration, the coming newsletters         will include features that provide an overview of the broad         range of LDC’s activities. This month, we'll examine English       treebanking efforts at LDC.  The English treebanking team is lead       by Ann Bies, Senior Research Coordinator.  The association of treebanks       with LDC began with the publication of the original Penn English       Treebank (Treebank-2)       in 1995.  Since that time       the need for new varieties of English treebank data has continued       to grow, and LDC has expanded its expertise to address new       research challenges.  This       includes the development of treebanked data for additional domains       including conversational speech and web text as well as the       creation of parallel treebank data.

Speech data presents unique       challenges not inherent in edited text such as speech disfluency       and hesitations.  Penn       Treebank contains conversational speech data from the Switchboardtelephone
      collection which has been tagged, dysfluency-annotated, and       parsed.  LDC’s more recent publication, English CTS Treebank with Structural           Metadata,       builds on that annotation and includes new data. The development       of that corpus was motivated by the need to have both structural       metadata and syntactic structure annotated in order to support       work on speech parsing and structural event detection. The       annotation involved a two-pass approach to annotating metadata,       speech effects and syntactic structure in transcribed       conversational speech: separately annotating for structural       metadata, or structural events, and for syntactic structure. The       two annotations were then combined into a single aligned       representation.

Also recently, LDC has undertaken       complex syntactic annotation of data collected over the web.  Since most parsers are       trained using newswire, they achieve better accuracy on similar       heavily edited texts.  LDC,       through a gift from Google Inc., developed English Web
        Treebank to improve parsing, translation and information       extraction on unedited domains, such as blogs, newsgroups, and       consumer reviews.  LDC’s       annotation guidelines were adapted to handle unique features of       web text such as inconsistent punctuation and capitalization as       well as the increased use of slang, technical jargon and       ungrammatical sentences.

LDC and its research partners are       also involved in the creation of parallel treebanks used for word       alignment tasks.  Parallel       treebanks are annotated morphological and syntactic structures       that are aligned at sentence as well as sub-sentence levels. These       resources are used for improving machine translation quality. To       create such treebanks, English files (translated from         the source Arabic or Chinese) are first automatically  part-of-speech       tagged and parsed and then hand-corrected at each stage.  The quality control process       consists of a series of specific searches for over 100 types of       potential inconsistency and parser or annotation error.  Parallel treebank data in the       LDC catalog includes the English Translation
        Treebank: An Nahar Newswire whose files are parallel with       those in Arabic Treebank:
        Part 3 v 3.2

English treebanking at       LDC is ongoing; new titles are in progress and will be added to       our catalog.

New Publications
     

(1) GALE Chinese-English
        Word Alignment and Tagging Training Part 1 -- Newswire and Web       was developed by LDC and contains 150,068 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.  This  release consists of Chinese       source newswire and web data (newsgroup, weblog) collected by LDC       in 2008.

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.

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 1 -- Newswire and Web is distributed via web       download.

2012 Subscription Members will automatically       receive two copies of this data on disc.  2012 Standard Members       may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.        Non-members may license this data for US$1750.

*

(2) MADCAT
        Phase 1 Training Set contains all training data created by       LDC to support Phase 1 of the DARPA MADCAT Program. The data in       this release consists of handwritten Arabic documents scanned at       high resolution and annotated for the physical coordinates of each       line and token. Digital transcripts and English translations of       each document are also provided, with the various content and       annotation layers integrated in a single MADCAT XML output.

The goal of the MADCAT program is to       automatically convert foreign text images into English       transcripts. MADCAT Phase 1 data was collected by LDC from Arabic       source documents in three genres: newswire, weblog and newsgroup       text. Arabic speaking 'scribes' copied documents by hand,       following specific instructions on writing style (fast, normal,       careful), writing implement (pen, pencil) and paper (lined,       unlined). Prior to assignment, source documents were processed to       optimize their appearance for the handwriting task, which resulted       in some original source documents being broken into multiple       'pages' for handwriting. Each resulting handwritten page was       assigned to up to five independent scribes, using different       writing conditions.

The handwritten, transcribed documents were  checked for quality and       completeness, then each page was scanned at a high resolution (600       dpi, greyscale) to create a digital version of the handwritten       document. The scanned images were then annotated to indicate the       physical coordinates of each line and token. Explicit reading       order was also labeled, along with any errors produced by the       scribes when copying the text.

The final step was to produce a unified data       format that takes multiple data streams and generates a single xml       output file which contains all required information. The resulting       xml file  has these       distinct components: a text layer that consists of the source       text, tokenization and sentence segmentation; an image layer that       consist of bounding boxes; a scribe demographic layer that       consists of scribe ID and partition (train/test); and a document       metadata layer. This release includes 9693 annotation files in       MADCAT XML format (.madcat.xml) along with their corresponding       scanned image files in TIFF format.

MADCAT Phase 1 Training Set is distributed on       two DVD-ROM.

2012 Subscription Members will automatically       receive two copies of this data.  2012 Standard Members may       request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.        Non-members may license this data for US$2000.

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Speechocean - Language Resource Catalogue - New Released (01- 2012)

Speechocean, as a global provider of language resources and data services, has more than 200 large-scale databases available in 80+ languages and accents covering the fields of Text to Speech, Automatic Speech Recognition, Text, Machine Translation, Web Search, Videos, Images etc.

Speechocean is glad to announce that more Speech Resources has been released:

Chinese and English Mixing Speech Synthesis Database (Female)

The Chinese Mandarin TTS Speech Corpus contains the read speech of a native Chinese Female professional broadcaster recorded in a studio with high SNR (>35dB) over two channels (AKG C4000B microphone and Electroglottography (EGG) sensor). 
The Corpus includes the following categories:
1.    Basic Mandarin sub-corpus: including 5,000 utterances which were carefully designed considering all kinds of linguistic phenomena. All sentences were declarative and extracted from News channels of People's Daily, China Daily, etc. The prompts with negative words were carefully excluded. ONLY suitable length sentences were accepted (7~20 words, in average 14 words). This sub-corpus can be used for R&D of HMM-based TTS, Limit domain TTS and Small-scale concatenative TTS;
2.    Complementary Mandarin sub-corpus: including 10,000 utterances which were carefully designed considering all kinds of linguistic phenomena. All sentences were declarative and extracted from News channels of People's Daily, China Daily, etc. The prompts with negative words are carefully excluded. ONLY suitable length sentences were accepted (7~20 words, average 14 words). This sub-corpus is a complementary corpus for Basic Mandarin sub-corpus and can be used for R&D of Large-scale concatenative TTS;
3.    Mandarin Neutral sub-corpus: including 380 Chinese bi-syllable words which embedded in carrier sentences;
4.    Mandarin ERHUA sub-corpus: including 290 Chinese Erhua syllables which embedded in carrier sentences;
5.    Mandarin Digit-String sub-corpus: including 1250 utterances with 3-digit length which considered the different pronunciation of 1, i.e. “yi1” and “yao1”.
6.    Mandarin Question sub-corpus: including 300 question sentences with common used question mark, for example “吗”, “么”, “呢”, and etc.;
7.    Mandarin exclamatory sub-corpus: including 200 exclamatory sentences with common used exclamatory mark, for example “呀”, “啊”, “吧”, “啦”, and etc.;
8.    Chinese English sentence sub-corpus: including 1,000 sentences which were carefully designed considering bi-phone coverage. All sentences were extracted from News channels of Voice of America (VOA), and etc. The prompts with negative words are carefully excluded. ONLY suitable length sentences were accepted (7~20 words, in average 12 words) and phonetically annotated with SAMPA. This sub-corpus can be used for R&D of HMM-based TTS, Limit domain TTS and Small-scale concatenative TTS;
9.    Chinese English words sub-corpus: including about 6,000 commonly used English words which embedded in carrier sentence;
10.    Chinese English Abbreviation sub-corpus: including about 200 utterances which considered not only the alphabet coverage, but also the combination of character and digit, such as “MP4”;
11.    Chinese English Letter sub-corpus: including 26 carrier utterances with each letter embedded in the Beginning, Middle and End;
12.    Chinese Greek Letter sub-corpus: including 24 carrier utterances with each letter embedded in the Beginning, Middle and End.

All speech data are segmented and labeled on phone level. Pronunciation lexicon and pitch extract from EEG can also be provided based on demands.

France French Speech Recognition Corpus (desktop) – 50 speakers

This France French desktop speech recognition database was collected by SpeechOcean in France. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD) which contains the database collections for 30 languages presently. 

It contains the voices of 50 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16 – 30, 31 – 45, 46 – 60), gender (28 males, 22 females) and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognition applications. Each speaker recorded 500 utterances in a quiet office environment through two professional microphones. Each utterance is stored as 44.1K 16Bit uncompressed PCM format and accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

UK English Speech Recognition Corpus (desktop) – 50 speakers

This UK English desktop speech recognition database was collected by SpeechOcean in England. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD) which contains the database collections for 30 languages presently. 

It contains the voices of 50 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16 – 30, 31 – 45, 46 – 60), gender (28 males, 22 females) and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognition applications. Each speaker recorded 500 utterances in a quiet office environment through two professional microphones. Each utterance is stored as 44.1K 16Bit uncompressed PCM format and accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

US English Speech Recognition Corpus (desktop) – 50 speakers

This US English desktop speech recognition database was collected by SpeechOcean in America. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD) which contains the database collections for 30 languages presently. 

It contains the voices of 50 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16 – 30, 31 – 45, 46 – 60), gender (25 males, 25 females) and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognition applications. Each speaker recorded 500 utterances in a quiet office environment through two professional microphones. Each utterance is stored as 44.1K 16Bit uncompressed PCM format and accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

Italian Speech Recognition Corpus (desktop) – 50 speakers

This Italian desktop speech recognition database was collected by SpeechOcean in Italy. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD) which contains the database collections for 30 languages presently. 

It contains the voices of 50 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16 – 30, 31 – 45, 46 – 60), gender (23 males, 27 females) and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognition applications. Each speaker recorded 500 utterances in a quiet office environment through two professional microphones. Each utterance is stored as 44.1K 16Bit uncompressed PCM format and accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

For more information about our Database and Services please visit our website www.Speechocen.com or visit our on-line Catalogue at http://www.speechocean.com/en-Product-Catalogue/Index.html

If you have any inquiry regarding our databases and service please feel free to contact us:

Xianfeng Cheng mailto: Chengxianfeng@speechocean.com

Marta Gherardi mailto: Marta@speechocean.com

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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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