The Sheffield Wargames Corpus.

Recognition of speech in natural environments is a challenging task, even more so if this involves conversations between sev-eral speakers. Work on meeting recognition has addressed some of the significant challenges, mostly targeting formal, business style meetings where people are mostly in a static position in a room. Only limited data is available that contains high qual-ity near and far field data from real interactions between par-ticipants. In this paper we present a new corpus for research on speech recognition, speaker tracking and diarisation, based on recordings of native speakers of English playing a table-top wargame. The Sheffield Wargames Corpus comprises 7 hours of data from 10 recording sessions, obtained from 96 micro-phones, 3 video cameras and, most importantly, 3D location data provided by a sensor tracking system. The corpus repre-sents a unique resource, that provides for the first time location tracks (1.3Hz) of speakers that are constantly moving and talk-ing. The corpus is available for research purposes, and includes annotated development and evaluation test sets. Baseline results for close-talking and far field sets are included in this paper. 1

Multimodal person recognition for human-vehicle interaction

Next-generation vehicles will undoubtedly feature biometric person recognition as part of an effort to improve the driving experience. Today's technology prevents such systems from operating satisfactorily under adverse conditions. A proposed framework for achieving person recognition successfully combines different biometric modalities, borne out in two case studies

Alcohol Language Corpus

The Alcohol Language Corpus (ALC) is the first publicly available speech corpus comprising intoxicated and sober speech of 162 female and male German speakers. Recordings are done in the automotive environment to allow for the development of automatic alcohol detection and to ensure a consistent acoustic environment for the alcoholized and the sober recording. The recorded speech covers a variety of contents and speech styles. Breath and blood alcohol concentration measurements are provided for all speakers. A transcription according to SpeechDat/Verbmobil standards and disfluency tagging as well as an automatic phonetic segmentation are part of the corpus. An Emu version of ALC allows easy access to basic speech parameters as well as the us of R for statistical analysis of selected parts of ALC. ALC is available without restriction for scientific or commercial use at the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals

The DRIVE-SAFE project: signal processing and advanced information technologies for improving driving prudence and accidents

In this paper, we will talk about the Drivesafe project whose aim is creating conditions for prudent driving on highways and roadways with the purposes of reducing accidents caused by driver behavior. To achieve these primary goals, critical data is being collected from multimodal sensors (such as cameras, microphones, and other sensors) to build a unique databank on driver behavior. We are developing system and technologies for analyzing the data and automatically determining potentially dangerous situations (such as driver fatigue, distraction, etc.). Based on the findings from these studies, we will propose systems for warning the drivers and taking other precautionary measures to avoid accidents once a dangerous situation is detected. In order to address these issues a national consortium has been formed including Automotive Research Center (OTAM), Koç University, Istanbul Technical University, Sabancı University, Ford A.S., Renault A.S., and Fiat A. Ş

Beyond aspect: will be -ing and shall be -ing

This article discusses the synchronic status and diachronic development of will be -ing and shall be -ing (as in I’ll be leaving at noon).2 Although available since at least Middle English, the constructions did not establish a significant foothold in standard English until the twentieth century. Both types are also more prevalent in British English (BrE) than American English (AmE). We argue that in present-day usage will/shall be -ing are aspectually underspecified: instances that clearly construe a situation as future-in-progress are in the minority. Similarly, although volition-neutrality has been identified as a key feature of will/shall be -ing, it is important to take account of other, generally richer meanings and associations, notably ‘future-as-matter-of-course’ (Leech 2004), ‘already-decided future’ (Huddleston & Pullum et al. 2002) and non-agentivity. Like volition-neutrality, these characteristics appear to be relevant not only in contemporary use, but also in their historical expansion. We show that the construction has evolved from progressive aspect towards more subjectivised evidential meaning

Directing and requesting: two interactive uses of the mental state terms want and need

This article is focused on the uses of the terms want and need to build directives and requests in family interaction. The study is located within the theoretical framework of discursive psychology, using the methods of conversation analysis. Within social cognitive research, mental state terms are analyzed as references to inner mental experiences. In contrast, this article analyzes the selection of want and need as sequential phenomena. The use of I want to deliver directives increases the likelihood of compliance when one cannot monitor or control whether a projected action will be carried out. Requests built using I need are recurrently delivered following a request from an interlocutor and delay the granting of the request while maintaining alignment. Thus rather than simply expressing an internal mental experience, the verbs want and need have specific practical uses in their normative sequential environments

Reenactment: An embodied cognition approach to meaning and linguistic content

A central finding in experimental research identified with Embodied Cognition (EC) is that understanding actions involves their embodied simulation, i.e. executing some processes involved in performing these actions. Extending these findings, I argue that reenactment – the overt embodied simulation of actions and practices, including especially communicative actions and practices, within utterances – makes it possible to forge an integrated EC-based account of linguistic meaning. In particular, I argue: (a) that remote entities can be referred to by reenacting actions performed with them; (b) that the use of grammatical constructions can be conceived of as the reenactment of linguistic action routines; (c) that complex enunciational structures (reported speech, irony, etc.) involve a separate level of reenactment, on which characters are presented as interacting with one another within the utterance; (d) that the segmentation of long utterances into shorter units involves the reenactment of brief audience interventions between units; and (e) that the overall meaning of an utterance can be stated in reenactment terms. The notion of reenactment provides a conceptual framework for accounting for aspects of language that are usually thought to be outside the reach of EC in an EC framework, thus supporting a view of meaning and linguistic content as thoroughly grounded in action and interaction

Characteristics of Vietnamese lexis of Vietnamese Australian immigrants

The Vietnamese of Australian communities (VAC) still maintains many obsolete expressions originating from and related to the Southern Vietnamese political institutions of the pre-1975 Southern government. In addition, VAC has adopted English loanwords (ELs) through close contact with Australian English and uses them extensively to fill gaps in vocabulary. English loanwords have not only been borrowed in their original forms but were also nativized through the mechanism of loanwords and loan translation. Moreover, hybridised expressions have been coined by Vietnamese Australian émigrés through the compounding of one English or Vietnamese item with a Vietnamese or English item through loan blending