Search engine for multilingual audiovisual contents

This paper describes the BUCEADOR search engine, a web server that allows retrieving. multimedia documents (text, audio, video) in different languages. All the documents are translated into the user language and are presented either as text (for instance, subtitles in video documents) or dubbed audio. The user query consist in a sequence of keywords and can be typed or spoken. Multiple Spoken Language Technologies (SLT) servers have been implemented, such as speech recognition, speech machine translation and text-to-speech conversion. The platform can be used in the four Spanish official (Spanish, Basque, Catalan and Galician) and in English.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

BUCEADOR, a multi-language search engine for digital libraries

This paper presents a web-based multimedia search engine built within the Buceador (www.buceador.org) research project. A proof-of-concept tool has been implemented which is able to retrieve information from a digital library made of multimedia documents in the 4 official languages in Spain (Spanish, Basque, Catalan and Galician). The retrieved documents are presented in the user language after translation and dubbing (the four previous languages + English). The paper presents the tool functionality, the architecture, the digital library and provide some information about the technology involved in the fields of automatic speech recognition, statistical machine translation, text-to-speech synthesis and information retrieval. Each technology has been adapted to the purposes of the presented tool as well as to interact with the rest of the technologies involved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

An Illustrated Methodology for Evaluating ASR Systems

Proceeding of: 9th International Workshop on Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval (AMR 2011) Took place 2011, July, 18-19, in Barcelona, Spain. The event Web site is http://stel.ub.edu/amr2011/Automatic speech recognition technology can be integrated in an information retrieval process to allow searching on multimedia contents. But, in order to assure an adequate retrieval performance is necessary to state the quality of the recognition phase, especially in speaker-independent and domainindependent environments. This paper introduces a methodology to accomplish the evaluation of different speech recognition systems in several scenarios considering also the creation of new corpora of different types (broadcast news, interviews, etc.), especially in other languages apart from English that are not widely addressed in speech community.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Center for Industry Technological Development (CDTI, Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade), through the BUSCAMEDIA Project (CEN-20091026). And also by MA2VICMR: Improving the access, analysis and visibility of the multilingual and multimedia information in web for the Region of Madrid (S2009/TIC-1542).Publicad

An Overview of the IberSpeech-RTVE 2022 Challenges on Speech Technologies

Evaluation campaigns provide a common framework with which the progress of speech technologies can be effectively measured. The aim of this paper is to present a detailed overview of the IberSpeech-RTVE 2022 Challenges, which were organized as part of the IberSpeech 2022 conference under the ongoing series of Albayzin evaluation campaigns. In the 2022 edition, four challenges were launched: (1) speech-to-text transcription; (2) speaker diarization and identity assignment; (3) text and speech alignment; and (4) search on speech. Different databases that cover different domains (e.g., broadcast news, conference talks, parliament sessions) were released for those challenges. The submitted systems also cover a wide range of speech processing methods, which include hidden Markov model-based approaches, end-to-end neural network-based methods, hybrid approaches, etc. This paper describes the databases, the tasks and the performance metrics used in the four challenges. It also provides the most relevant features of the submitted systems and briefly presents and discusses the obtained results. Despite employing state-of-the-art technology, the relatively poor performance attained in some of the challenges reveals that there is still room for improvement. This encourages us to carry on with the Albayzin evaluation campaigns in the coming years.This work was partially supported by Radio Televisión Española through the RTVE Chair at the University of Zaragoza, and Red Temática en Tecnologías del Habla (RED2022-134270-T), funded by AEI (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación); It was also partially funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant 101007666; in part by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union “NextGenerationEU”/ PRTR under Grants PDC2021-120846C41 PID2021-126061OB-C44, and in part by the Government of Aragon (Grant Group T3623R); it was also partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (OPEN-SPEECH project, PID2019-106424RB-I00) and by the Basque Government under the general support program to research groups (IT-1704-22), and by projects RTI2018-098091-B-I00 and PID2021-125943OB-I00 (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and ERDF) as well

Search on speech from spoken queries: the Multi-domain International ALBAYZIN 2018 Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection Evaluation

[Abstract] The huge amount of information stored in audio and video repositories makes search on speech (SoS) a priority area nowadays. Within SoS, Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection (QbE STD) aims to retrieve data from a speech repository given a spoken query. Research on this area is continuously fostered with the organization of QbE STD evaluations. This paper presents a multi-domain internationally open evaluation for QbE STD in Spanish. The evaluation aims at retrieving the speech files that contain the queries, providing their start and end times, and a score that reflects the confidence given to the detection. Three different Spanish speech databases that encompass different domains have been employed in the evaluation: MAVIR database, which comprises a set of talks from workshops; RTVE database, which includes broadcast television (TV) shows; and COREMAH database, which contains 2-people spontaneous speech conversations about different topics. The evaluation has been designed carefully so that several analyses of the main results can be carried out. We present the evaluation itself, the three databases, the evaluation metrics, the systems submitted to the evaluation, the results, and the detailed post-evaluation analyses based on some query properties (within-vocabulary/out-of-vocabulary queries, single-word/multi-word queries, and native/foreign queries). Fusion results of the primary systems submitted to the evaluation are also presented. Three different teams took part in the evaluation, and ten different systems were submitted. The results suggest that the QbE STD task is still in progress, and the performance of these systems is highly sensitive to changes in the data domain. Nevertheless, QbE STD strategies are able to outperform text-based STD in unseen data domains.Centro singular de investigación de Galicia; ED431G/04Universidad del País Vasco; GIU16/68Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; TEC2015-68172-C2-1-PMinisterio de Ciencia, Innovación y Competitividad; RTI2018-098091-B-I00Xunta de Galicia; ED431G/0

Speech technologies for the audiovisual and multimedia interaction environments

361 p

Comparison of ALBAYZIN query-by-example spoken term detection 2012 and 2014 evaluations

Query-by-example spoken term detection (QbE STD) aims at retrieving data from a speech repository given an acoustic query containing the term of interest as input. Nowadays, it is receiving much interest due to the large volume of multimedia information. This paper presents the systems submitted to the ALBAYZIN QbE STD 2014 evaluation held as a part of the ALBAYZIN 2014 Evaluation campaign within the context of the IberSPEECH 2014 conference. This is the second QbE STD evaluation in Spanish, which allows us to evaluate the progress in this technology for this language. The evaluation consists in retrieving the speech files that contain the input queries, indicating the start and end times where the input queries were found, along with a score value that reflects the confidence given to the detection of the query. Evaluation is conducted on a Spanish spontaneous speech database containing a set of talks from workshops, which amount to about 7 h of speech. We present the database, the evaluation metric, the systems submitted to the evaluation, the results, and compare this second evaluation with the first ALBAYZIN QbE STD evaluation held in 2012. Four different research groups took part in the evaluations held in 2012 and 2014. In 2014, new multi-word and foreign queries were added to the single-word and in-language queries used in 2012. Systems submitted to the second evaluation are hybrid systems which integrate letter transcription- and template matching-based systems. Despite the significant improvement obtained by the systems submitted to this second evaluation compared to those of the first evaluation, results still show the difficulty of this task and indicate that there is still room for improvement.This research was funded by the Spanish Government ('SpeechTech4All Project' TEC2012 38939 C03 01 and 'CMC-V2 Project' TEC2012 37585 C02 01), the Galician Government through the research contract GRC2014/024 (Modalidade: Grupos de Referencia Competitiva 2014) and 'AtlantTIC Project' CN2012/160, and also by the Spanish Government and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under project TACTICA

Albayzín-2014 evaluation: audio segmentation and classification in broadcast news domains

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13636-015-0076-3Audio segmentation is important as a pre-processing task to improve the performance of many speech technology tasks and, therefore, it has an undoubted research interest. This paper describes the database, the metric, the systems and the results for the Albayzín-2014 audio segmentation campaign. In contrast to previous evaluations where the task was the segmentation of non-overlapping classes, Albayzín-2014 evaluation proposes the delimitation of the presence of speech, music and/or noise that can be found simultaneously. The database used in the evaluation was created by fusing different media and noises in order to increase the difficulty of the task. Seven segmentation systems from four different research groups were evaluated and combined. Their experimental results were analyzed and compared with the aim of providing a benchmark and showing up the promising directions in this field.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Government and the European Union (FEDER) under the project TIN2011-28169-C05-02 and supported by the European Regional Development Fund and the Spanish Government (‘SpeechTech4All Project’ TEC2012-38939-C03

Language report for Catalan (English version)

The central objective of the Metanet4u project is to contribute to the establishment of a pan-European digital platform that makes available language resources and services, encompassing both datasets and software tools, for speech and language processing, and supports a new generation of exchange facilities for them.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Multilingual sentiment analysis in social media.

252 p.This thesis addresses the task of analysing sentiment in messages coming from social media. The ultimate goal was to develop a Sentiment Analysis system for Basque. However, because of the socio-linguistic reality of the Basque language a tool providing only analysis for Basque would not be enough for a real world application. Thus, we set out to develop a multilingual system, including Basque, English, French and Spanish.The thesis addresses the following challenges to build such a system:- Analysing methods for creating Sentiment lexicons, suitable for less resourced languages.- Analysis of social media (specifically Twitter): Tweets pose several challenges in order to understand and extract opinions from such messages. Language identification and microtext normalization are addressed.- Research the state of the art in polarity classification, and develop a supervised classifier that is tested against well known social media benchmarks.- Develop a social media monitor capable of analysing sentiment with respect to specific events, products or organizations