Albayzin 2018 Evaluation: The IberSpeech-RTVE Challenge on Speech Technologies for Spanish Broadcast Media

The IberSpeech-RTVE Challenge presented at IberSpeech 2018 is a new Albayzin evaluation series supported by the Spanish Thematic Network on Speech Technologies (Red Temática en Tecnologías del Habla (RTTH)). That series was focused on speech-to-text transcription, speaker diarization, and multimodal diarization of television programs. For this purpose, the Corporacion Radio Television Española (RTVE), the main public service broadcaster in Spain, and the RTVE Chair at the University of Zaragoza made more than 500 h of broadcast content and subtitles available for scientists. The dataset included about 20 programs of different kinds and topics produced and broadcast by RTVE between 2015 and 2018. The programs presented different challenges from the point of view of speech technologies such as: the diversity of Spanish accents, overlapping speech, spontaneous speech, acoustic variability, background noise, or specific vocabulary. This paper describes the database and the evaluation process and summarizes the results obtained

Speech Denoising Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization with Kullback-Leibler Divergence and Sparseness Constraints

Proceedings of: IberSPEECH 2012 Conference, Madrid, Spain, November 21-23, 2012.A speech denoising method based on Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is presented in this paper. With respect to previous related works, this paper makes two contributions. First, our method does not assume a priori knowledge about the nature of the noise. Second, it combines the use of the Kullback-Leibler divergence with sparseness constraints on the activation matrix, improving the performance of similar techniques that minimize the Euclidean distance and/or do not consider any sparsification. We evaluate the proposed method for both, speech enhancement and automatic speech recognitions tasks, and compare it to conventional spectral subtraction, showing improvements in speech quality and recognition accuracy, respectively, for different noisy conditions.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Government grants TSI-020110-2009-103 and TEC2011-26807.Publicad

Analysing the Performance of Automatic Speech Recognition for Ageing Voice: Does it Correlate with Dependency Level?

International audienceAmbient Assisted Living aims at providing assistance by allowing people with special needs to perform tasks which they have increasing difficulty with and to provide reassurance through surveillance in order to detect distress and accidental falls. Aged people are among the ones who might benefit from advances in ICT to live as long as possible in their own home. Voice-base smart home is a promising way to provide AAL, but even mature technologies must be evaluated from the perspec- tive of its potential beneficiaries. In this paper, we investigate which characteristics of the ageing voice that challenge a state of the art ASR system. Though in the literature, chronological age is retain as the sole factor predicting decrease in performance, we show that degree of loss of autonomy is even more correlated to ASR performance

Intra- and Inter-database Study for Arabic, English, and German Databases:Do Conventional Speech Features Detect Voice Pathology?

A large population around the world has voice complications. Various approaches for subjective and objective evaluations have been suggested in the literature. The subjective approach strongly depends on the experience and area of expertise of a clinician, and human error cannot be neglected. On the other hand, the objective or automatic approach is noninvasive. Automatic developed systems can provide complementary information that may be helpful for a clinician in the early screening of a voice disorder. At the same time, automatic systems can be deployed in remote areas where a general practitioner can use them and may refer the patient to a specialist to avoid complications that may be life threatening. Many automatic systems for disorder detection have been developed by applying different types of conventional speech features such as the linear prediction coefficients, linear prediction cepstral coefficients, and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). This study aims to ascertain whether conventional speech features detect voice pathology reliably, and whether they can be correlated with voice quality. To investigate this, an automatic detection system based on MFCC was developed, and three different voice disorder databases were used in this study. The experimental results suggest that the accuracy of the MFCC-based system varies from database to database. The detection rate for the intra-database ranges from 72% to 95%, and that for the inter-database is from 47% to 82%. The results conclude that conventional speech features are not correlated with voice, and hence are not reliable in pathology detection

On Distant Speech Recognition for Home Automation

The official version of this draft is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16226-3_7International audienceIn the framework of Ambient Assisted Living, home automation may be a solution for helping elderly people living alone at home. This study is part of the Sweet-Home project which aims at developing a new home automation system based on voice command to improve support and well-being of people in loss of autonomy. The goal of the study is vocal order recognition with a focus on two aspects: distance speech recognition and sentence spotting. Several ASR techniques were evaluated on a realistic corpus acquired in a 4-room flat equipped with microphones set in the ceiling. This distant speech French corpus was recorded with 21 speakers who acted scenarios of activities of daily living. Techniques acting at the decoding stage, such as our novel approach called Driven Decoding Algorithm (DDA), gave better speech recognition results than the baseline and other approaches. This solution which uses the two best SNR channels and a priori knowledge (voice commands and distress sentences) has demonstrated an increase in recognition rate without introducing false alarms

Distant speech recognition for home automation: Preliminary experimental results in a smart home

International audienceThis paper presents a study that is part of the Sweet-Home project which aims at developing a new home automation system based on voice command. The study focused on two tasks: distant speech recognition and sentence spotting (e.g., recognition of domotic orders). Regarding the first task, different combinations of ASR systems, language and acoustic models were tested. Fusion of ASR outputs by consensus and with a triggered language model (using a priori knowledge) were investigated. For the sentence spotting task, an algorithm based on distance evaluation between the current ASR hypotheses and the predefine set of keyword patterns was introduced in order to retrieve the correct sentences in spite of the ASR errors. The techniques were assessed on real daily living data collected in a 4-room smart home that was fully equipped with standard tactile commands and with 7 wireless microphones set in the ceiling. Thanks to Driven Decoding Algorithm techniques, a classical ASR system reached 7.9% WER against 35% WER in standard configuration and 15% with MLLR adaptation only. The best keyword pattern classification result obtained in distant speech conditions was 7.5% CER

Assisted Transcription of Video Lectures

[EN] Study of the supervision process of video lectures transciption automatically[ES] Estudio del proceso de supervisión de transcipción de videos educativos generados automaticamente.Valor Miró, JD. (2013). Assisted Transcription of Video Lectures. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/39552Archivo delegad