Monolingual and bilingual spanish-catalan speech recognizers developed from SpeechDat databases

Under the SpeechDat specifications, the Spanish member of SpeechDat consortium has recorded a Catalan database that includes one thousand speakers. This communication describes some experimental work that has been carried out using both the Spanish and the Catalan speech material. A speech recognition system has been trained for the Spanish language using a selection of the phonetically balanced utterances from the 4500 SpeechDat training sessions. Utterances with mispronounced or incomplete words and with intermittent noise were discarded. A set of 26 allophones was selected to account for the Spanish sounds and clustered demiphones have been used as context dependent sub-lexical units. Following the same methodology, a recognition system was trained from the Catalan SpeechDat database. Catalan sounds were described with 32 allophones. Additionally, a bilingual recognition system was built for both the Spanish and Catalan languages. By means of clustering techniques, the suitable set of allophones to cover simultaneously both languages was determined. Thus, 33 allophones were selected. The training material was built by the whole Catalan training material and the Spanish material coming from the Eastern region of Spain (the region where Catalan is spoken). The performance of the Spanish, Catalan and bilingual systems were assessed under the same framework. The Spanish system exhibits a significantly better performance than the rest of systems due to its better training. The bilingual system provides an equivalent performance to that afforded by both language specific systems trained with the Eastern Spanish material or the Catalan SpeechDat corpus.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Spanish dialects: phonetic transcription

It is well known that canonical Spanish, the dialectal variant `central' of Spain, so called Castilian, can be transcribed by rules. This paper deals with the automatic grapheme to phoneme transcription rules in several Spanish dialects from Latin America. Spanish is a language spoken by more than 300 million people, has an important geographical dispersion compared among other languages and has been historically influenced by many native languages. In this paper authors expand the Castilian transcription rules to a set of different dialectal variants of Latin America. Transcriptions are based on SAMPA symbols. The paper includes an identification of sounds that doesn't appear in Castilian, extend accepted SAMPA symbols for Spanish (Castilian) to different dialectal variants, describes the necessary rules to implement an automatic Orthographic to Phonetic transcription in several dialectal Spanish variants and show some quantitative results of dialectal differences.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

The TALP on-line Spanish-Catalan machine-translation system

In this paper the statistical machine translator (SMT) between Catalan and Spanish developed at the TALP research center (UPC) and its web demonstration are described.Postprint (published version

Recognition of Numbers and Strings of Numbers by Using Demisyllables: One Speaker Experiment

This communication reports the use of demisyllables for continuous speech recognition in a specific application: the recognition of Spanish numbers. After a brief outline of the recognition system, a description of demisyllable syntactic constraints and one-speaker reference generation is provided. Finally, the recognition performance is assessed by means of two experiments: the recognition of integer numbers from zero to one thousand and telephone numbers uttered in a Spanish way (strings of integers from zero to ninety nine), in both applications the results that the system yielded were excellent.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Analysis of Monosodium l-Glutamate in Food Products by High-Performance Thin Layer Chromatography

A simple, fast, specific, and precise high-performance thin layer chromatography method has been developed for the estimation of monosodium l-glutamate (MSG) in food products. Aluminum plates precoated with silica gel 60 GF254were used as stationary phase and a mixture of methanol–chloroform–formic acid in the ratio 5:5:1 (v/v) as mobile phase. Quantification was carried out by postchromatographic derivatization using 1% ninhydrin solution, and the developed spots were scanned by using a densitometer in absorbance mode at 485 nM. The Rfvalue of MSG was 0.64. The results of the analysis have been validated statistically and by the recovery studies. Linearity was observed in the concentration range of 400–1000 nG