Text Normalisation of Dialectal Finnish

Tekstin normalisointi on prosessi, jossa epästandardia kirjoitettua kieltä muutetaan standardisoituun muotoon. Murteet ovat yksi esimerkki epästandardista kielestä, joka voi poiketa huomattavastikin standardisoidusta yleiskielestä. Lisäksi suomen kieli on ortografialtaan varsin pitkälti foneemista, minkä ansiosta myös puhutun kielen ominaispiirteet on mahdollista tuoda esille kirjoitetussa muodossa. Etenkin epävirallisilla alustoilla ja arkikielisessä kontekstissa, kuten sosiaalisessa mediassa, suomen kielen puhujat saattavat kirjoittaa sanat kuten ääntäisivät ne normaalisti puhuessaan. Tällaista epästandardista kielestä koostuvaa aineistoa voi löytää myös luonnollisen kielen käsittelyn tarpeisiin esimerkiksi Twitteristä. Perinteiselle yleiskieliselle tekstiaineistolle suunnatut luonnollisen kielen käsittelyn työkalut eivät kuitenkaan välttämättä saavuta toivottavia tuloksia puhekieliselle aineistolle sovellettuna, jolloin ratkaisuna voidaan käyttää välivaiheena tekstin normalisointia. Normalisointiprosessissa syötteenä käytettävä puhekielinen tai muutoin epästandardia kieltä sisältävä teksti muutetaan standardisoituun kirjoitusasuun, jota luonnollisen kielen käsittelyn työkalut paremmin ymmärtävät. Tämä työ pohjaa aiempaan tutkimukseen, jota on tehty suomen murteiden normalisoinnin parissa. Aiemmissa tutkimuksissa on todettu, että merkkipohjaiset BRNN-neuroverkkomallit (Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Nerwork) saavuttavat hyviä tuloksia suomen kielen murteiden normalisoinnissa, kun syötteenä käytetään sanoja kolmen kappaleen lohkoissa. Tämä tarkoittaa, että järjestelmä saa syötteenä kerrallaan kolmen sanan joukon, ja jokainen sana on edelleen pilkottu välilyönnein eroteltuihin kirjoitusmerkkeihin. Tässä työssä pyrittiin käyttämään samoja metodeja ja aineistoa kuin aiemmassa tutkimuksessa, jotta tulokset olisivat vertailukelpoisia. Aineistona on käytetty Kotimaisten kielten keskuksen ylläpitämää Suomen kielen näytteitä -korpusta, ja normalisointiin on käytetty OpenNMT-nimistä avoimen lähdekoodin kirjastoa. Työssä toteutetuista kokeiluista saadut tulokset näyttävät vahvistavan aiempien tutkimustulosten pohjalta tehdyt löydökset, mutta lisäksi on viitteitä siitä, että neuroverkkomallit saattaisivat pidemmistä lohkoista koostuvista syötteistä. BRNN-mallin lisäksi työssä kokeillaan myös muita neuroverkkoarkkitehtuureja, mutta vertailtaessa sanavirheiden suhdelukua mittaavaa WER-arvoa (Word Error Rate) voidaan todeta, että BRNN-malli suoriutuu normalisointitehtävästä muita neuroverkkoarkkitehtuureja paremmin

「総合日本語」の授業で行うゼロ初級からの音声教育の実践 : アクセント,イントネーションの自然性を重視した視覚化補助教材の使用

吉林華橋外国語学院Jilin HuaQiao University of Foreign Languages1節では,本研究が国立国語研究所共同研究プロジェクト「日本語教育のためのコーパスを利用したオンライン日本語アクセント辞書の開発」の一部であり,web辞書構築の土台となる韻律教育の効果を,紙媒体を使って検証してきたものであることを述べた。2節では,音声の特徴と,学習者の日本語らしい音声習得へのニーズの高さについて述べた。3節では,日本と中国で学習者の日本語音声に対する関心は高くても,音声教育が体系的に行われていないこと,従来の教科書には単音や語のアクセント型の記述はあっても,連語のアクセントや文のイントネーションの記述は少ないこと,しかし最近は韻律の重要性の認識が高まり,韻律学習を目的とした教材の出版が顕著に増えているが,現在のカリキュラムや教材の中で音声教育が自然に導入されることが理想的であることを述べた。4節では,中国語話者の日本語発話の韻律的特徴について述べた。中国語話者のピッチパターンでは,文節ごとの急峻なピッチの上下変動がみられ,音響的な意味のまとまりの形成を阻害すること,日本語にはないアクセント型が出現しやすいことを述べた。5節では,従来の音声教育の問題点を踏まえ,web辞書OJAD開発に関わる教育効果を検証するために,開発と並行して行ってきた紙媒体での音声教育の実践方法について述べた。6節では,音声教育実践の効果についてアンケート調査をもとに分析を行った。ゼロ初級からの音声教育は従来のカリキュラムを変更することなく行え,韻律視覚化教材使用によって教師と学習者間で音声に関して様々な気づきと対話が生まれ,教師は基準をもとに自信を持って指導することができるようになり,学習者は音声学習を負担に感じるよりむしろ面白いと答えた。7節では,教材のweb化,OJADの開発について紹介した。This paper reports on the introduction of Japanese prosody learning for beginners in an integrated Japanese course at a Chinese university. The first section addresses how practical findings on Japanese prosody education were introduced into our collaborative project to develop the Online Japanese Accent Dictionary (OJAD) with the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. The second section explains Japanese prosodic features and the learners\u27 need to acquire more naturally sounding Japanese pronunciation. Section 3 points out the lack of opportunity for systematic prosodic learning for students. For example, accent control in conjugated words and intonation control within phrases and sentences are not well explained in Japanese textbooks. Section 4 describes the prosodic features of Japanese sentences that characterize Chinese speakers\u27 accents. Section 5 outlines the practical methods of speech education that were developed for a Japanese integrated course for freshmen students majoring in Japanese at the university. Section 6 analyzes the result of a questionnaire survey distributed at the end of the first semester regarding effectiveness of the visualized prosody material. Results showed that 88% of learners surveyed found the materials to be useful, 82% of learners paid careful attention to Japanese speech sounds when practicing, and 78% of learners found learning Japanese prosody interesting. Section 7 describes the OJAD system, which supports prosody learning for Japanese learners all over the world

Statistical identification of articulatory roles in speech production.

The human speech apparatus is a rich source of information and offers many cues in the speech signal due to its biomechanical constraints and physiological interdependencies. Coarticulation, a direct consequence of these speech production factors, is one of the main problems affecting the performance of speech systems. Incorporation of production knowledge could potentially benefit speech recognisers and synthesisers. Hand coded rules and scores derived from the phonological knowledge used by production oriented models of speech are simple and incomplete representations of the complex speech production process. Statistical models built from measurements of speech articulation fail to identify the cause of constraints. There is a need for building explanatory yet descriptive models of articulation for understanding and modelling the effects of coarticulation. This thesis aims at providing compact descriptive models of realistic speech articulation by identifying and capturing the essential characteristics of human articulators using measurements from electro-magnetic articulography. The constraints on articulators during speech production are identified in the form of critical, dependent and redundant roles using entirely statistical and data-driven methods. The critical role captures the maximally constrained target driven behaviour of an articulator. The dependent role models the partial constraints due to physiological interdependencies. The redundant role reflects the unconstrained behaviour of an articulator which is maximally prone to coarticulation. Statistical target models are also obtained as the by-product of the identified roles. The algorithm for identification of articulatory roles (and estimation of respective model distributions) for each phone is presented and the results are critically evaluated. The identified data-driven constraints obtained are compared with the well known and commonly used constraints derived from the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). The identified critical roles were not only in agreement with the place and manner descriptions of each phone but also provided a phoneme to phone transformation by capturing language and speaker specific behaviour of articulators. The models trained from the identified constraints fitted better to the phone distributions (40% improvement) . The evaluation of the proposed search procedure with respect to an exhaustive search for identification of roles demonstrated that the proposed approach performs equally well for much less computational load. Articulation models built in the planning stage using sparse yet efficient articulatory representations using standard trajectory generation techniques showed some potential in modelling articulatory behaviour. Plenty of scope exists for further developing models of articulation from the proposed framework

IberSPEECH 2020: XI Jornadas en Tecnología del Habla and VII Iberian SLTech

IberSPEECH2020 is a two-day event, bringing together the best researchers and practitioners in speech and language technologies in Iberian languages to promote interaction and discussion. The organizing committee has planned a wide variety of scientific and social activities, including technical paper presentations, keynote lectures, presentation of projects, laboratories activities, recent PhD thesis, discussion panels, a round table, and awards to the best thesis and papers. The program of IberSPEECH2020 includes a total of 32 contributions that will be presented distributed among 5 oral sessions, a PhD session, and a projects session. To ensure the quality of all the contributions, each submitted paper was reviewed by three members of the scientific review committee. All the papers in the conference will be accessible through the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Online Archive. Paper selection was based on the scores and comments provided by the scientific review committee, which includes 73 researchers from different institutions (mainly from Spain and Portugal, but also from France, Germany, Brazil, Iran, Greece, Hungary, Czech Republic, Ucrania, Slovenia). Furthermore, it is confirmed to publish an extension of selected papers as a special issue of the Journal of Applied Sciences, “IberSPEECH 2020: Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages”, published by MDPI with fully open access. In addition to regular paper sessions, the IberSPEECH2020 scientific program features the following activities: the ALBAYZIN evaluation challenge session.Red Española de Tecnologías del Habla. Universidad de Valladoli

音声インタフェースにおける高度な音声言語処理モデルに関する研究

筑波大学 (University of Tsukuba)201

James Michael Curley Scrapbooks Volume A27

The James Michael Curley Scrapbook Collection consists of digitized microfilmed copies of notebooks kept by Curley from 1914-1937. These notebooks contain news clippings that were drawn primarily from Boston newspapers. Curley was born in Roxbury, MA in 1874. He served four terms as Mayor of Boston: 1914–1918, 1922–1926, 1930–1934 and 1946–1950. He also served as Governor of Massachusetts from 1935-1937. In addition to Curley’s political career, the scrapbooks also include clippings about his first wife Mrs. Mary Herlihy Curley (1884-1930) and their daughter Mary D. Curley (1909-1950). A selection of the notebooks were microfilmed in 1962. The microfilm can be found in the holdings of Dinand Library, Holy Cross’s main library. This volume includes clippings from 1917.https://crossworks.holycross.edu/curley_scrapbooks/1015/thumbnail.jp