An Overview of the Slovenian Spoken Dialog System

In the paper we present the modules of the Slovenian spoken dialog system, developed within the joint project in multilingual speech recognition and understanding “Spoken Queries in European Languages” (SQEL-Copernicus-1634). The system can handle spontaneous speech and provide the user with correct information in the domain of air flight information retrieval. The major modules of the system perform word recognition, linguistic analysis, dialog management and speech synthesis. Some results with respect to word accuracy, semantic accuracy and dialog success rate are given, too

Development of a Speaker Diarization System for Speaker Tracking in Audio Broadcast News: a Case Study

A system for speaker tracking in broadcast-news audio data is presented and the impacts of the main components of the system to the overall speaker-tracking performance are evaluated. The process of speaker tracking in continuous audio streams involves several processing tasks and is therefore treated as a multistage process. The main building blocks of such system include the components for audio segmentation, speech detection, speaker clustering and speaker identification. The aim of the first three processes is to find homogeneous regions in continuous audio streams that belong to one speaker and to join each region of the same speaker together. The task of organizing the audio data in this way is known as speaker diarization and plays an important role in various speech-processing applications. In our case the impact of speaker diarization was assessed in a speaker-tracking system by performing a comparative study of how each of the component influenced the overall speaker-detection results. The evaluation experiments were performed on broadcast-news audio data with a speaker-tracking system, which was capable of detecting 41 target speakers. We implemented several different approaches in each component of the system and compared their performances by inspecting the final speaker-tracking results. The evaluation results indicate the importance of the audio-segmentation and speech-detection components, while no significant improvement of the overall results was achieved by additionally including a speaker-clustering component to the speaker-tracking system

Acoustic Modelling for Under-Resourced Languages

Automatic speech recognition systems have so far been developed only for very few languages out of the 4,000-7,000 existing ones. In this thesis we examine methods to rapidly create acoustic models in new, possibly under-resourced languages, in a time and cost effective manner. For this we examine the use of multilingual models, the application of articulatory features across languages, and the automatic discovery of word-like units in unwritten languages

Person Identification Using Multimodal Biometrics under Different Challenges

The main aims of this chapter are to show the importance and role of human identification and recognition in the field of human-robot interaction, discuss the methods of person identification systems, namely traditional and biometrics systems, and compare the most commonly used biometric traits that are used in recognition systems such as face, ear, palmprint, iris, and speech. Then, by showing and comparing the requirements, advantages, disadvantages, recognition algorithms, challenges, and experimental results for each trait, the most suitable and efficient biometric trait for human-robot interaction will be discussed. The cases of human-robot interaction that require to use the unimodal biometric system and why the multimodal biometric system is also required will be discussed. Finally, two fusion methods for the multimodal biometric system will be presented and compared