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

Wetland restoration and nitrate reduction: the example of the periurban wetland of Vitoria-Gasteiz (Basque Country, North Spain)

Changes in land use and agricultural intensification caused wetlands on the quaternary aquifer of Vitoria-Gasteiz (Basque Country) to disappear some years ago and nitrate concentration in groundwaters increased very quickly. The Basque Government recently declared the East Sector of this aquifer a Vulnerable Zone according to the 91/676/CEE European Directive. Recently, the wetlands have been restored through the closure of the main drainage ditches, the consequent elevation of the water table and the abondonment of agricultural practices near the wetlands. This is the case of the Zurbano wetland. Restoration has allowed the recovery of its biogeochemical function, which has reduced nitrate concentrations in waters. Nitrate concentrations which exceed 50 mg l–1 in groundwaters entering into the wetland are less than 10 mg l–1 at the outlet. Conditions in the wetland are conducive to the loss of nitrates: organic matter rich wetted soils, clay presence allowing a local semiconfined flow and very low hydraulic gradient. Water quality monitoring at several points around the wetland showed the processes involved in nitrate loss, although some aspects still remain unresolved. However, during storm events, the wetland effectively reduces the nitrate concentration entering the Alegria River, the most important river on the quaternary aquifer

STUDY OF THE MINIMUM SPOUTING VELOCITY IN A DRAFT TUBE CONICAL SPOUTED BED

A study has been carried out on the hydrodynamics of conical spouted beds with a non-porous draft-tube. A hydrodynamic correlation has been proposed for calculating the minimum spouting velocity as a function of dimensionless moduli that take into account geometric factors, particle characteristics and operating conditions. A statistical analysis of the data obtained following a design of experiments shows that the inlet diameter, particle diameter and the height of the entrainment zone are the parameter of greater influence on the minimum spouting velocity

DSBOX: herramienta docente para el diseño y simulación de entornos de red virtualizados

En este trabajo se describe DSBOX, una herramienta gráfica para el diseño y simulación empleando virtualización de pequeñas redes de computadores. Se describe el contexto que ha dado origen a esta herramienta y se detalla su arquitectura y las optimizaciones que se han realizado con el fin de dotar a los alumnos de una herramienta operativa que les facilite la realización de prácticas relacionadas con la seguridad informática y la administración de sistemas. Se presenta también un repositorio de actividades prácticas que hacen uso de la herramienta desarrollada.This paper describes DSBOX, a graphical tool for the design and simulation of small computer networks, employing virtualization software. We describe the context where this tool was created and its architecture and the optimizations that have been made in order to provide our students with a tool giving support to teaching activities in computer security and systems management. Finally, a repository with practical exer-cises using this tool is also described