In the transcription system for Intonational Variation (IVTS, derived from IViE), prosodic features are transcribed on (1) the rhythmic tier, (2) the local phonetic tier, (3) the global phonetic tier, and (4) the phonological tier. Each tier offers a range of labels which share a general architecture, but language-specific parameters determine which subset of labels a transcriber can choose fro...

We propose a new approach to improving named entity recognition (NER) in broadcast news speech data. The approach proceeds in two key steps: (1) we detect block alignments between highly similar blocks of the speech data and corresponding written news data that are easily obtainable from the Web, (2) we employ term expansion techniques commonly used in information retrieval to recover named ent...

We describe a proposed universal design infrastructure that aims at promoting better opportunities for students with disabilities in STEM programs to understand multimedia teaching material. The Accessible Educational STEM Videos Project aims to transform learning and teaching for students with disabilities through integrating synchronized captioned educational videos into undergraduate and gra...

This article presents an overview of the existing acoustical corpuses suitable for broadcast news automatic transcription task in the Slovak language. The TUKE-BNews-SK database created in our department was built to support the application development for automatic broadcast news processing and spontaneous speech recognition of the Slovak language. The audio corpus is composed of 479 Slovak TV...

The Language Environment Analysis system LENATM is used to capture day-long recordings of children’s natural audio environment. The system performs automated segmentation of the recordings and provides estimates for various measures. One of those measures is Adult Word Count (AWC), an approximation of the number of words spoken by adults in close proximity to the child. The LENA system was deve...

The child’s path towards an ability to produce initial consonant clusters has previously been described as involving, perhaps optional, stages of application of the processes ‘cluster simplification’ and ‘cluster reduction’ (for instance Grunwell, 1987). The process of ‘cluster simplification’ is described as a deletion of all but one members of the cluster, resulting in a unbranched syllable o...

Working with large corpora of text highlights the need for the special treatment of Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) words. This paper describes a strategy for processing OOV words within a Text-To-Speech (TTS) framework of the French language. A probabilistic module, called "Devin", guesses a Part-Of-Speech (POS) for each OOV word according to the morphological structure of the word and the context in ...

Greeklish to Greek transcription does undeniably seem to be a challenging task since it cannot be accomplished by directly mapping each Greek character to a corresponding symbol of the Latin alphabet. The ambiguity in the human way of Greeklish writing, since Greeklish users do not follow a standardized way of transliteration makes the process of transcribing Greeklish back to Greek alphabet ch...

Mismatched crowdsourcing derives speech transcriptions using crowd workers unfamiliar with the language being spoken. This approach has been demonstrated for isolated word transcription tasks, but never yet for continuous speech. In this work, we demonstrate mismatched crowdsourcing of continuous speech with a word error rate of under 45% in a large-vocabulary transcription task of short speech...

In this article, we describe a general methodology for enhancing sensing accuracy in cyber-physical systems that involve structured human interactions in noisy physical environment. We define structured human interactions as domain-specific workflow. A novel workflow-aware sensing model is proposed to jointly correct unreliable sensor data and keep track of states in a workflow. We also propose...