Visual units and confusion modelling for automatic lip-reading

Automatic lip-reading (ALR) is a challenging task because the visual speech signal is known to be missing some important information, such as voicing. We propose an approach to ALR that acknowledges that this information is missing but assumes that it is substituted or deleted in a systematic way that can be modelled. We describe a system that learns such a model and then incorporates it into decoding, which is realised as a cascade of weighted finite-state transducers. Our results show a small but statistically significant improvement in recognition accuracy. We also investigate the issue of suitable visual units for ALR, and show that visemes are sub-optimal, not but because they introduce lexical ambiguity, but because the reduction in modelling units entailed by their use reduces accuracy

A Two-level Morphology of Malagasy

PACLIC 19 / Taipei, taiwan / December 1-3, 200

Guessing lexicon entries using finite-state methods

A practical method for interactive guessing of LEXC lexicon entries is presented. The method is based on describing groups of similarly inflected words using regular expressions. The patterns are compiled into a finite-state transducer (FST) which maps any word form into the possible LEXC lexicon entries which could generate it. The same FST can be used (1) for converting conventional headword lists into LEXC entries, (2) for interactive guessing of entries, (3) for corpus-assisted interactive guessing and (4) guessing entries from corpora. A method of representing affixes as a table is presented as well how the tables can be converted into LEXC format for several different purposes including morphological analysis and entry guessing. The method has been implemented using the HFST finite-state transducer tools and its Python embedding plus a number of small Python scripts for conversions. The method is tested with a near complete implementation of Finnish verbs. An experiment of generating Finnish verb entries out of corpus data is also described as well as a creation of a full-scale analyzer for Finnish verbs using the conversion patterns