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ThC.SS - Multilingualism in Speech and Language Processing

Thursday, August 30, 2007, Astrid Plaza hotel, Room Scala 1

Session Chair: Jan Verhasselt, Tele Atlas

The main objectives of this special session are:

1. To offer a mature view on the nature and relevance of multilingualism issues in speech and language processing systems
2. To discuss the technological challenges involved and the solutions offered thus far
3. To anticipate on what kind of further research is needed to come up with more satisfactory solutions.

Program

13:30 – 14:00: Invited Tutorial

Tanja Schultz, Alan W Black, Sameer Badaskar, Matthew Hornyak and John Kominek (Carnegie Mellon University USA): SPICE - Web-based Tools for Rapid Language Adaptation in Speech Processing Systems.

In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a user interface for SPICE, a web-based toolkit for rapid prototyping of speech and language processing components. We report on the challenges and experiences gathered from testing these tools in an advanced graduate hands-on course, in which we created speech recognition, speech synthesis, and small domain translation components for 10 different languages within only 6 weeks.

14:00 – 14:30: Invited Tutorial

Filip Deprez, Jan Odijk and Jan De Moortel (Nuance Communications International, Belgium): Introduction to Multilingual Corpus-Based Concatenative Speech Synthesis.

This tutorial paper addresses foreign-language support in corpus-based concatenative text-to-speech systems. We give an overview of application domains where strictly monolingual speech synthesis is not sufficient and where multilingual text-to-speech is required or highly desirable. We describe two approaches to multilingual corpus-based speech synthesis: phoneme mapping on the one hand, and the creation of multilingual speech databases on the other. We list the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. Index Terms: speech synthesis, multilingualism, phoneme mapping, multilingual speech database

14:30 – 15:30: Oral session

14:30 - Recognition of foreign names spoken by native speakers, Frederik Stouten and Jean-Pierre Martens, Ghent University, Belgium

14:50 - Language Identification using several sources of information with a multiple-Gaussian classifier, Ricardo Cordoba, Luis F. D'Haro, Fernando Fernandez-Martinez, Juan M. Montero, Roberto Barra, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

15:10 - Dynamic Language Change in MIMUS, Carmen Del Solar, Guillermo Pérez, Eva Florencio, David Moral, Gabriel Amores, Pilar Manchón, University of Seville, Spain

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