Impact of frame rate on automatic speech-text alignment for corpus-based phonetic studies

International audiencePhonetic segmentation is the basis for many phonetic and linguistic studies. As manual segmentation is a lengthy and tedious task, automatic procedures have been developed over the years. They rely on acoustic Hidden Markov Models. Many studies have been conducted, and refinements developed for corpus based speech synthesis, where the technology is mainly used in a speaker-dependent context and applied on good quality speech signals. In a different research direction, automatic speech-text alignment is also used for phonetic and linguistic studies on large speech corpora. In this case, speaker independent acoustic models are mandatory, and the speech quality may not be so good. The speech models rely on 10 ms shift between acoustic frames, and their topology leads to strong minimum duration constraints. This paper focuses on the acoustic analysis frame rate, and gives a first insight on the impact of the frame rate on corpus-based phonetic studies

Improving language models by using distant information

International audienceThis study examines how to take originally advantage from distant information instatistical language models. We show that it is possible to use n-gram models considering histories different from those used during training. These models are called crossing context models. Our study deals with classical and distant n-gram models. A mixture of four models is proposed and evaluated. A bigram linear mixture achieves an improvement of 14% in terms of perplexity. Moreover the trigram mixture outperforms the standard trigram by 5.6%. These improvements have been obtained without complexifying standard n-gram models. The resulting mixture language model has been integrated into a speech recognition system. Its evaluation achieves a slight improvement in terms of word error rate on the data used for the francophone evaluation campaign ESTER. Finally, the impact of the proposed crossing context language models on performance is presented according to various speakers

Machine-assisted translation by Human-in-the-loop Crowdsourcing for Bambara

Language is more than a tool of conveying information; it is utilized in all aspects of our lives. Yet only a small number of languages in the 7,000 languages worldwide are highly resourced by human language technologies (HLT). Despite African languages representing over 2,000 languages, only a few African languages are highly resourced, for which there exists a considerable amount of parallel digital data. We present a novel approach to machine translation (MT) for under-resourced languages by improving the quality of the model using a paradigm called ``humans in the Loop.\u27\u27 This thesis describes the work carried out to create a Bambara-French MT system including data discovery, data preparation, model hyper-parameter tuning, the development of a crowdsourcing platform for humans in the loop, vocabulary sizing, and segmentation. We present a novel approach to machine translation (MT) for under-resourced languages by improving the quality of the model using a paradigm called ``humans in the Loop.\u27\u27 We achieved a BLEU (bilingual evaluation understudy) score of 17.5. The results confirm that MT for Bambara, despite our small data set, is viable. This work has the potential to contribute to the reduction of language barriers between the people of Sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world

Spoken Corpora Good Practice Guide 2006

International audienceThere is currently a vast amount of fundamental or applied research, which is based on the exploitation of oral corpora (organized recorded collections of oral and multimodal language productions). Created as a result of linguists becoming aware of the importance to ensure the durability of sources and a diversified access to the oral documents they produce, this Guide to good practice mainly deals with “oral corpora”, created for and used by linguists. But the questions raised by the creation and documentary exploitation of these corpora can be found in numerous disciplines: ethnology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, demography, oral history notably use oral surveys, testimonies, interviews, life stories. Based on a linguistic approach, this Guide also touches on the preoccupations of other researchers who use oral corpora (for example in the field of speech synthesis and recognition), even if their specific needs aren’t consistently dealt with in the present document

An exploration of the rhythm of Malay

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in speech rhythm. However we still lack a clear understanding of the nature of rhythm and rhythmic differences across languages. Various metrics have been proposed as means for measuring rhythm on the phonetic level and making typological comparisons between languages (Ramus et al, 1999; Grabe & Low, 2002; Dellwo, 2006) but the debate is ongoing on the extent to which these metrics capture the rhythmic basis of speech (Arvaniti, 2009; Fletcher, in press). Furthermore, cross linguistic studies of rhythm have covered a relatively small number of languages and research on previously unclassified languages is necessary to fully develop the typology of rhythm. This study examines the rhythmic features of Malay, for which, to date, relatively little work has been carried out on aspects rhythm and timing. The material for the analysis comprised 10 sentences produced by 20 speakers of standard Malay (10 males and 10 females). The recordings were first analysed using rhythm metrics proposed by Ramus et. al (1999) and Grabe & Low (2002). These metrics (∆C, %V, rPVI, nPVI) are based on durational measurements of vocalic and consonantal intervals. The results indicated that Malay clustered with other so-called syllable-timed languages like French and Spanish on the basis of all metrics. However, underlying the overall findings for these metrics there was a large degree of variability in values across speakers and sentences, with some speakers having values in the range typical of stressed-timed languages like English. Further analysis has been carried out in light of Fletcher’s (in press) argument that measurements based on duration do not wholly reflect speech rhythm as there are many other factors that can influence values of consonantal and vocalic intervals, and Arvaniti’s (2009) suggestion that other features of speech should also be considered in description of rhythm to discover what contributes to listeners’ perception of regularity. Spectrographic analysis of the Malay recordings brought to light two parameters that displayed consistency and regularity for all speakers and sentences: the duration of individual vowels and the duration of intervals between intensity minima. This poster presents the results of these investigations and points to connections between the features which seem to be consistently regulated in the timing of Malay connected speech and aspects of Malay phonology. The results are discussed in light of current debate on the descriptions of rhythm

General Undergraduate Catalog, 1978-1979

https://mds.marshall.edu/catalog_1970-1979/1008/thumbnail.jp

A comparative study of the communication problems found in Corporate Public Relations and the U.S. Army information program

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit