La sobirania tecnològica per al català: quines opcions tenim?

Les aplicacions tecnològiques amb alguna finalitat lingüística com ara traductors automàtics, sistemes de diàleg, reconeixedors de la parla, generadors de resums automàtics, etc. tenen normalment una arquitectura comuna a totes les llengües. Cada aplicació, aleshores, s'adapta mitjançant corpus específics per a cada llengua. Per tant, es necessiten dos components: l'arquitectura i les dades, i tant l'un com l'altre constitueixen recursos que poden ser de propietat o lliures. En el cas del programari lliure, l'usuari té accés al codi font i el pot modificar a la seva conveniència i/o distribuir-lo lliurement. També pot ser, però, que l'usuari tingui accés al codi font, però no pugui modificar-lo ni distribuir el producte, de manera que tindríem un recurs de codi obert però no lliure. Els seus usos i possibilitats es determinen a través de la llicència que s'atorga a cada producte

Integrating lexical and prosodic features for automatic paragraph segmentation

Spoken documents, such as podcasts or lectures, are a growing presence in everyday life. Being able to automatically identify their discourse structure is an important step to understanding what a spoken document is about. Moreover, finer-grained units, such as paragraphs, are highly desirable for presenting and analyzing spoken content. However, little work has been done on discourse based speech segmentation below the level of broad topics. In order to examine how discourse transitions are cued in speech, we investigate automatic paragraph segmentation of TED talks using lexical and prosodic features. Experiments using Support Vector Machines, AdaBoost, and Neural Networks show that models using supra-sentential prosodic features and induced cue words perform better than those based on the type of lexical cohesion measures often used in broad topic segmentation. Moreover, combining a wide range of individually weak lexical and prosodic predictors improves performance, and modelling contextual information using recurrent neural networks outperforms other approaches by a large margin. Our best results come from using late fusion methods that integrate representations generated by separate lexical and prosodic models while allowing interactions between these features streams rather than treating them as independent information sources. Application to ASR outputs shows that adding prosodic features, particularly using late fusion, can significantly ameliorate decreases in performance due to transcription errors.The second author was funded from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the GA H2020-RIA-645012 and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity Juan de la Cierva program. The other authors were funded by the University of Edinburgh

Corpora compilation for prosody-informed speech processing

Research on speech technologies necessitates spoken data, which is usually obtained through read recorded speech, and specifically adapted to the research needs. When the aim is to deal with the prosody involved in speech, the available data must reflect natural and conversational speech, which is usually costly and difficult to get. This paper presents a machine learning-oriented toolkit for collecting, handling, and visualization of speech data, using prosodic heuristic. We present two corpora resulting from these methodologies: PANTED corpus, containing 250 h of English speech from TED Talks, and Heroes corpus containing 8 h of parallel English and Spanish movie speech. We demonstrate their use in two deep learning-based applications: punctuation restoration and machine translation. The presented corpora are freely available to the research community

Acylation of Chiral Alcohols: A Simple Procedure for Chiral GC Analysis

The use of iodine as a catalyst and either acetic or trifluoroacetic acid as a derivatizing reagent for determining the enantiomeric composition of acyclic and cyclic aliphatic chiral alcohols was investigated. Optimal conditions were selected according to the molar ratio of alcohol to acid, the reaction time, and the reaction temperature. Afterwards, chiral stability of chiral carbons was studied. Although no isomerization was observed when acetic acid was used, partial isomerization was detected with the trifluoroacetic acid. A series of chiral alcohols of a widely varying structural type were then derivatized with acetic acid using the optimal conditions. The resolution of the enantiomeric esters and the free chiral alcohols was measured using a capillary gas chromatograph equipped with a CP Chirasil-DEX CB column. The best resolutions were obtained with 2-pentyl acetates (α = 3.00) and 2-hexyl acetates (α = 1.95). This method provides a very simple and efficient experimental workup procedure for analyzing chiral alcohols by chiral-phase GC

What kind of sustainable development do we need?

Today, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the main framework of reference when addressing sustainability and human development. Unfortunately, there are several aspects and issues that the SDGs have ignored or underestimated and can become serious obstacles to their success. Among them, the ethical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of human life seem to have faded into oblivion. Without these dimensions, the SDGs may become a kind of well-intended but blind problem-solving strategy that ignores the reasons of the crisis it wants to redress. This absence is apparent when the vocabulary used by the SDGs comes under scrutiny and is still more evident when it is compared with the language used in other well-known international declarations on the same subject. Bringing this shortcoming to light opens the possibility for the SDGs to review the strategies with which they could be more effective when pursuing their purposes in the coming years.Hoy, los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS) constituyen el marco de referencia principal a la hora de abordar la sostenibilidad y el desarrollo humano. Desafortunadamente, existen varios aspectos y cuestiones que se han ignorado en los ODS, o bien subestimado, que pueden convertirse en serios obstáculos para su éxito. Entre ellos, las dimensiones éticas, culturales y espirituales de la vida humana parecen haberse desvanecido en el olvido. Sin estas dimensiones, los ODS pueden convertirse en una especie de estrategia de resolución de problemas bien intencionada, mas ciega, en la que se ignoran las razones de la crisis que se desea corregir. Dicha ausencia es clara cuando se examina el vocabulario utilizado en los ODS y resulta más evidente cuando se compara con el lenguaje empleado en otras conocidas declaraciones internacionales sobre el mismo tema. Sacar a la luz esta carencia abre la posibilidad de que los ODS revisen las estrategias con las que podrían ser más efectivos a la hora de perseguir sus propósitos en los próximos años.&nbsp

A web-based translation service at the UOC based on Apertium

Abstract—In this paper, we describe the adaptation process of Apertium, a free/open-source rule-based machine translation platform which is operating in a number of different real-life contexts, to the linguistic needs of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC), a private e-learning university based in Barcelona where linguistic and cultural diversity is a crucial factor. This paper describes the main features of the Apertium platform and the practical developments required to fully adapt it to UOC’s linguistic needs. The settting up of a translation service at UOC based on Apertium shows the growing interest of large institutions with translation needs for open-source solutions in which their investment is oriented toward adding value to the available features to offer the best possible adapted service to their user community. I

Comparación de dos métodos basados en la intensidad para el cálculo automático de la velocidad de habla

Automatic computation of speech rate is a necessary task in a wide range of applications that require this prosodic feature, in which a manual transcription and time alignments are not available. Several tools have been developed to this end, but not enough research has been conducted yet to see to what extent they are scalable to other languages. In the present work, we take two off-the- shelf tools designed for automatic speech rate computation and already tested for Dutch and English (v1, which relies on intensity peaks preceded by an intensity dip to find syllable nuclei and v3, which relies on intensity peaks surrounded by dips) and we apply them to read and spontaneous Spanish speech. Then, we test which of them offers the best performance. The results obtained with precision and normalized mean squared error metrics showed that v3 performs better than v1. However, recall measurement shows a better performance of v1, which suggests that a more fine-grained analysis on sensitivity and specificity is needed to select the best option depending on the application we are dealing with.El cálculo automático de la velocidad de habla es una tarea fonética útil y que además se hace indispensable cuando no hay disponible una transcripción manual a partir de la cual determinar una tasa de habla manual. Se han desarrollado varias herramientas para este fin, pero todavía no se ha llevado a cabo suficiente investigación para ver hasta qué punto las herramientas son aplicables a lenguas distintas para las que fueron diseñadas. En este artículo probamos dos herramientas para el cálculo automático de la velocidad de habla ya evaluadas para el neerlandés y el inglés (v1, que se basa en la determinación de picos de intensidad precedidos de un valle para encontrar núcleos de sílaba, y v3, que se basa en picos de intensidad rodeados de valles) y las aplicamos a un corpus de habla leída y espontánea del español para analizar cuál ofrece mejores resultados en español. Los resultados de precisión y del error cuadrático mediano normalizado obtenidos muestran que v3 funciona mejor que v1. No obstante, el recall muestra mejor rendimiento para la v1, lo que nos indica que se necesita un análisis detallado de la sensibilidad y la especificidad para seleccionar la mejor opción en función de los objetivos del análisis posterior que se quiera hacer

On the Need of Standard Assessment Metrics for Automatic Speech Rate Computation Tools

Comunicació a congrès: 4th Phonetics and Phonology in Europe 2021 (PaPE 2021): Phonetics and Phonology: Real-world applications. 21 to 23 June 2021. Barcelona. Virtual

Paragraph-based Prosodic Cues for Speech Synthesis Applications

Paper presented at: Speech Prosody 2016; 2016 May 31-June 3; Boston (MA, USA)Speech synthesis has improved in both expressiveness and voice quality in recent years. However, obtaining full expressiveness when dealing with large multi-sentential synthesized discourse is still a challenge, since speech synthesizers do not take into account the prosodic differences that have been observed in discourse units such as paragraphs. The current study validates and extends previous work by analyzing the prosody of paragraph units in a large and diverse corpus of TED Talks using automatically extracted F0, intensity and timing features. In addition, a series of classification experiments was performed in order to identify which features are consistently used to distinguish paragraph breaks. The results show significant differences in prosody related to paragraph position. Moreover, the classification experiments show that boundary features such as pause duration and differences in F0 and intensity levels are the most consistent cues in marking paragraph boundaries. This suggests that these features should be taken into account when generating spoken discourse in order to improve naturalness and expressiveness.Part of this work has received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the GA H2020-RIA-645012. The first author is partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity through the Juan de la Cierva program and a Jos´e Castillejo mobility gran