Automatic Phonetic Transcription of Non-Prompted Speech

A reliable method for automatic phonetic transcription of non− prompted German speech has been developed at th

Design of a phonetic corpus for speech recognition in catalan

In this paper, we present the design of a corpus for speech recognition to be used for the recording of a speech database in Catalan. A previous database in Spanish was the reference in setting the specifications about the characteristics of the sentences and in the minimum number of units required. An analysis of unit frequencies were carried out in order to know which units were relevant for training and to compare the results with the figures from the designed corpus. Three different sub-corpora were generated, one for training, ...Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

BAStat : New Statistical Resources at the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals

A new type of language resource ’BAStat’ has been released by the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals. In contrast to primary resources like speech and text corpora BAStat comprises statistical estimates based on a number of primary resources: first and second order occurrence probability of phones, syllables and words, duration statistics, probabilities of pronunciation variants of words and probabilities of context information. Unlike other statistical speech resources BAStat is based solely on recordings of conversational German and therefore models spoken language. It consists of 7-bit ASCII tables and matrices to maximize inter-operability between different platforms and can be downloaded from the BAS web-site. This paper gives a detailed description about the empirical basis, the contained data types, some interesting interpretations and a brief comparison to the text-based statistical resource CELEX

BEA – A multifunctional Hungarian spoken language database

In diverse areas of linguistics, the demand for studying actual language use is on the increase. The aim of developing a phonetically-based multi-purpose database of Hungarian spontaneous speech, dubbed BEA2, is to accumulate a large amount of spontaneous speech of various types together with sentence repetition and reading. Presently, the recorded material of BEA amounts to 260 hours produced by 280 present-day Budapest speakers (ages between 20 and 90, 168 females and 112 males), providing also annotated materials for various types of research and practical applications

Annotation Graphs and Servers and Multi-Modal Resources: Infrastructure for Interdisciplinary Education, Research and Development

Annotation graphs and annotation servers offer infrastructure to support the analysis of human language resources in the form of time-series data such as text, audio and video. This paper outlines areas of common need among empirical linguists and computational linguists. After reviewing examples of data and tools used or under development for each of several areas, it proposes a common framework for future tool development, data annotation and resource sharing based upon annotation graphs and servers.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

ATLAS: A flexible and extensible architecture for linguistic annotation

We describe a formal model for annotating linguistic artifacts, from which we derive an application programming interface (API) to a suite of tools for manipulating these annotations. The abstract logical model provides for a range of storage formats and promotes the reuse of tools that interact through this API. We focus first on ``Annotation Graphs,'' a graph model for annotations on linear signals (such as text and speech) indexed by intervals, for which efficient database storage and querying techniques are applicable. We note how a wide range of existing annotated corpora can be mapped to this annotation graph model. This model is then generalized to encompass a wider variety of linguistic ``signals,'' including both naturally occuring phenomena (as recorded in images, video, multi-modal interactions, etc.), as well as the derived resources that are increasingly important to the engineering of natural language processing systems (such as word lists, dictionaries, aligned bilingual corpora, etc.). We conclude with a review of the current efforts towards implementing key pieces of this architecture.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure