Correlating ASR Errors with Developmental Changes in Speech Production: A Study of 3-10-Year-Old European Portuguese Children's Speech

International audienceAutomatically recognising children's speech is a very difficult task. This difficulty can be attributed to the high variability in children's speech, both within and across speakers. The variability is due to developmental changes in children's anatomy, speech production skills et cetera, and manifests itself, for example, in fundamental and formant frequencies, the frequency of disfluencies, and pronunciation quality. In this paper, we report the results of acoustic and auditory analyses of 3-10-year-old European Portuguese children's speech. Furthermore, we are able to correlate some of the pronunciation error patterns revealed by our analyses - such as the truncation of consonant clusters - with the errors made by a children's speech recogniser trained on speech collected from the same age group. Other pronunciation error patterns seem to have little or no impact on speech recognition performance. In future work, we will attempt to use our findings to improve the performance of our recogniser

Revising the Annotation of a Broadcast News Corpus: a Linguistic Approach

This paper presents a linguistic revision process of a speech corpus of Portuguese broadcast news focusing on metadata annotation for rich transcription, and reports on the impact of the new data on the performance for several modules. The main focus of the revision process consisted on annotating and revising structural metadata events, such as disfluencies and punctuation marks. The resultant revised data is now being extensively used, and was of extreme importance for improving the performance of several modules, especially the punctuation and capitalization modules, but also the speech recognition system, and all the subsequent modules. The resultant data has also been recently used in disfluency studies across domains.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Report on second selection of resources, revising selection in D2.1

The central objective of the Metanet4u project is to contribute to the establishment of a pan-European digital platform that makes available language resources and services, encompassing both datasets and software tools, for speech and language processing, and supports a new generation of exchange facilities for them.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Report on first selection of resources

The central objective of the Metanet4u project is to contribute to the establishment of a pan-European digital platform that makes available language resources and services, encompassing both datasets and software tools, for speech and language processing, and supports a new generation of exchange facilities for them.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Evaluation of a live broadcast news subtitling system for portuguese

Abstract Broadcast news play an important role in our lives providing access to news, information and entertainment. The existence of subtitles is an important medium for inclusion of people with special needs and also an advantage on noisy and populated environments. In this work we will describe and evaluate a system for subtitling live broadcast news for RTP (Rádio Televisão de Portugal) the Portuguese public broadcast company. Developing a fully automatic subtitling system is a huge breakthrough which results from the convergence of different research models and software developments to create a working system. Our online system has 12% word error rate for the displayed subtitles working under real time with an average latency of just 6.5 seconds