Towards spoken dialect identification of Irish

The Irish language is rich in its diversity of dialects and accents. This compounds the difficulty of creating a speech recognition system for the low-resource language, as such a system must contend with a high degree of variability with limited corpora. A recent study investigating dialect bias in Irish ASR found that balanced training corpora gave rise to unequal dialect performance, with performance for the Ulster dialect being consistently worse than for the Connacht or Munster dialects. Motivated by this, the present experiments investigate spoken dialect identification of Irish, with a view to incorporating such a system into the speech recognition pipeline. Two acoustic classification models are tested, XLS-R and ECAPA-TDNN, in conjunction with a text-based classifier using a pretrained Irish-language BERT model. The ECAPA-TDNN, particularly a model pretrained for language identification on the VoxLingua107 dataset, performed best overall, with an accuracy of 73%. This was further improved to 76% by fusing the model's outputs with the text-based model. The Ulster dialect was most accurately identified, with an accuracy of 94%, however the model struggled to disambiguate between the Connacht and Munster dialects, suggesting a more nuanced approach may be necessary to robustly distinguish between the dialects of Irish.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 2023 Workshop of the 2nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group of Under-resourced Languages Workshop, Dublin (SiGUL

Towards dialect-inclusive recognition in a low-resource language: are balanced corpora the answer?

ASR systems are generally built for the spoken 'standard', and their performance declines for non-standard dialects/varieties. This is a problem for a language like Irish, where there is no single spoken standard, but rather three major dialects: Ulster (Ul), Connacht (Co) and Munster (Mu). As a diagnostic to quantify the effect of the speaker's dialect on recognition performance, 12 ASR systems were trained, firstly using baseline dialect-balanced training corpora, and then using modified versions of the baseline corpora, where dialect-specific materials were either subtracted or added. Results indicate that dialect-balanced corpora do not yield a similar performance across the dialects: the Ul dialect consistently underperforms, whereas Mu yields lowest WERs. There is a close relationship between Co and Mu dialects, but one that is not symmetrical. These results will guide future corpus collection and system building strategies to optimise for cross-dialect performance equity.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 2023, Dubli

Disentagling and Connecting Different Perspectives on Prosodic Prominence

Wagner P, Origlia A, Avesani C, et al. Disentagling and Connecting Different Perspectives on Prosodic Prominence. Presented at the ICPL 2015, Cologne

Corporate Tax Games: A Case Study of Ireland in the Global Politics of Tax

Optimistic observers have heralded the current, unprecedented global tax reforms as the beginning of the end of the tax haven system. Whether this is the case depends on the (already doubtful) robustness of the proposed reforms and the responses of multi-national corporations and states that have an interest in sustaining international tax competition. Measuring change in this area is no easy task, not least given the ambiguous nature of corporate tax avoidance. Ireland is an ideal example of ambiguity in the world of corporate tax. This is because it has features of a tax haven, and yet, also has features that do not fit the classic description. The thesis studies a particular skill within Ireland’s Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) skillset that is hidden. This is the skill of playing corporate tax games well. A theory of global tax games is developed, defined as institutionalised, reflexive modes of strategic interaction among states and corporations, constituted by the configuration of four fundamental dimensions of tax. These dimensions are the rate of taxation, the jurisdiction which makes the claim, the capital owner responsible for any payment, and the definition of the return upon which the tax is claimed. These dimensions are configured in different ways. Each game has a distinctive ‘internal’ mode of coordination where actors compete, mutually adjust, cooperate and contest over tax claims, over an uncertain period of time, using tax rules and other institutional mechanisms. This approach tracks the evolving and interacting state-corporate engagement across the tax dimensions as a form of ‘infrastructural power’ (Braun, 2020), represented by tax games. By bridging the ‘state-centered’ perspective of the ‘classic’ tax competition literature and the transnationally focused literature associated with corporate ‘global wealth chains’ (Seabrooke and Wigan, 2017), a firmer analytical basis is offered to explore potential change in global tax

Analysis of Intonation Contours in Portrayed Emotions Using the Fujisaki Model

Abstract. This paper presents an analysis of f0 contours in portrayed emotions, using the Fujisaki model. The focus is on quantifying the f0 differences among the six emotions investigated (surprised, bored, neutral, angry, happy, and sad). The small dataset contained an utterance produced with the intention of portraying the six emotions (4 repetitions each). Preliminary results show that the Fujisaki parametrisation captures some striking intonational characteristics of these (intended) emotions. They indicate not only broad global differences, but also changes in the relationship of utterance internal constituents

Next-Generation Pertussis Vaccines Based on the Induction of Protective T Cells in the Respiratory Tract

Immunization with current acellular pertussis (aP) vaccines protects against severe pertussis, but immunity wanes rapidly after vaccination and these vaccines do not prevent nasal colonization with Bordetella pertussis. Studies in mouse and baboon models have demonstrated that Th1 and Th17 responses are integral to protective immunity induced by previous infection with B. pertussis and immunization with whole cell pertussis (wP) vaccines. Mucosal Th17 cells, IL-17 and secretory IgA (sIgA) are particularly important in generating sustained sterilizing immunity in the nasal cavity. Current aP vaccines induce potent IgG and Th2-skewed T cell responses but are less effective at generating Th1 and Th17 responses and fail to prime respiratory tissue-resident memory T (TRM) cells, that maintain long-term immunity at mucosal sites. In contrast, a live attenuated pertussis vaccine, pertussis outer membrane vesicle (OMV) vaccines or aP vaccines formulated with novel adjuvants do induce cellular immune responses in the respiratory tract, especially when delivered by the intranasal route. An increased understanding of the mechanisms of sustained protective immunity, especially the role of respiratory TRM cells, will facilitate the development of next generation pertussis vaccines that not only protect against pertussis disease, but prevent nasal colonization and transmission of B. pertussis

Modelling intonation in three Irish dialects

ABSTRACT This paper provides a preliminary account of features of the intonation structure of three Irish dialects, Donegal (Ulster Irish), Mayo, and Aran Islands, using the IViE syste