A cross-lingual adaptation approach for rapid development of speech recognizers for learning disabled users

Building a voice-operated system for learning disabled users is a difficult task that requires a considerable amount of time and effort. Due to the wide spectrum of disabilities and their different related phonopathies, most approaches available are targeted to a specific pathology. This may improve their accuracy for some users, but makes them unsuitable for others. In this paper, we present a cross-lingual approach to adapt a general-purpose modular speech recognizer for learning disabled people. The main advantage of this approach is that it allows rapid and cost-effective development by taking the already built speech recognition engine and its modules, and utilizing existing resources for standard speech in different languages for the recognition of the users’ atypical voices. Although the recognizers built with the proposed technique obtain lower accuracy rates than those trained for specific pathologies, they can be used by a wide population and developed more rapidly, which makes it possible to design various types of speech-based applications accessible to learning disabled users.This research was supported by the project ‘Favoreciendo la vida autónoma de discapacitados intelectuales con problemas de comunicación oral mediante interfaces personalizados de reconocimiento automático del habla’, financed by the Centre of Initiatives for Development Cooperation (Centro de Iniciativas de Cooperación al Desarrollo, CICODE), University of Granada, Spain. This research was supported by the Student Grant Scheme 2014 (SGS) at the Technical University of Liberec

Merging of Native and Non-native Speech for Low-resource Accented ASR

International audienceThis paper presents our recent study on low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR) system with accented speech. We propose multi-accent Subspace Gaussian Mixture Models (SGMM) and accent-specific Deep Neural Networks (DNN) for improving non-native ASR performance. In the SGMM framework, we present an original language weighting strategy to merge the globally shared parameters of two models based on native and non-native speech respectively. In the DNN framework, a native deep neural net is fine-tuned to non-native speech. Over the non-native baseline, we achieved relative improvement of 15 % for multi-accent SGMM and 34 % for accent-specific DNN with speaker adaptation

Suspension culture of plant cells under heterotrophic conditions

Plant cell culture technology (PCCT) provides an environmentally friendly and controlled method to produce secondary metabolites, and recombinant proteins (e.g., enzymes, antibodies, and vaccines). These molecules, having importance in medicine, food industry, and cosmetics, are in most cases expressed in heterotrophic growing plant cell suspension cultures. After presenting an overview of commercial products based on plant cell culture processes, this chapter will focus on plant cell suspension cultures and process and bioreactor design, which have proven to be useful for successfully moving up to a large scale. Two case studies describing the usage of the plant stem cell line PhytoCellTec Malus domestica cv. Uttwiler Spätlauber for cosmetic purposes and the manufacture of the pharmaceutical molecule paclitaxel highlight the latest improvements in PCCT and discuss costs and regulatory aspects from the manufacturer's view. Finally, a view on the development of heterotrophic plant cell fermentation is given

The ICSI RT-09 Speaker Diarization System

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Single‐use bioreactors : an overview

This chapter aims to give an overview of instrumented single‐use bioreactor (SUB) types that are currently available commercially. Based on the milestones in the development of SUBs, it focuses on the three most often applied types: wave‐mixed, stirred, and orbitally shaken versions. Their typical working principles are explained, possible fields of application are deduced, and trends in their selection are summarized. The development of SUBs can be described in three phases: the early beginnings; the establishment of disposable membrane bioreactors, multitray cell culture systems, and the first bag bioreactors; and the expansion of wave‐mixed, stirred, orbitally shaken, and further SUBs. The most suitable bioreactor for a desired application depends on several factors. The selection of the bioreactor is significantly influenced by the cultivation task, the engineering parameters of the bioreactor, the scale, the production organism, the legal requirements, the infrastructure, the know‐how of staff, and the costs for investment and operation