Continuous space language models

In the speech technology research community there is an increasing trend to use open source solutions. We present a new tool in that spirit, WaveSurfer, which has been developed at the Centre for Speech Technology at KTH. It has been designed for tasks such as viewing, editing, and labeling of audio data. WaveSurfer is built around a small core to which most functionality is added in the form of plug-ins. The tool has been designed to work on most common platforms and with the aims that it should be easy to configure and extend. WaveSurfer is provided as open source, under the GPL license with the explicit goal that the speech community jointly will improve and expand its scope and capabilities.

https://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/wsurf_icslp00.pdf

Wavesurfer - an open source speech tool.

`Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions -- audio, video and/or physiological recordings -- or it may be textual. The added notations may include transcriptions of all sorts (from phonetic features to discourse structures), part-of-speech and sense tagging, syntactic analysis, `named entity' identification, co-reference annotation, and so on. While there are several ongoing efforts to provide formats and tools for such annotations and to publish annotated linguistic databases, the lack of widely accepted standards is becoming a critical problem. Proposed standards, to the extent they exist, have focussed on file formats. This paper focuses instead on the logical structure of linguistic annotations. We survey a wide variety of existing annotation formats and demonstrate a common conceptual core, the annotation graph. This provides a formal framework for constructing, maintaining and searching linguistic annotations, while remaining consistent with many alternative data structures and file formats.

A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1112&context=cis_reports

A formal framework for linguistic annotation

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Barras2001.pdf

Transcriber: Development and use of a tool for assisting speech corpora production

This paper gives the final results of the ESTER evaluation campaign which started in 2003 and ended in January 2005. The aim of this campaign was to evaluate automatic broadcast news rich transcription systems for the French language. The evaluation tasks were divided into three main categories: orthographic transcription, event detection and tracking (e.g. speech vs. music, speaker tracking), and information extraction. The last one, limited to named entity detection in this evaluation, was a preliminary test. The paper reports on protocols and gives the results obtained in the campaign.

/pdf/the-ester-phase-ii-evaluation-campaign-for-the-rich-1j42jqfxn6.pdf

The ESTER Phase II Evaluation Campaign for the Rich Transcription of French Broadcast News

This paper gives an overview of the evaluation campaign ESTER. The aim of this campaign is to evaluate automatic broadcast news transcriptions systems for the French language. The evaluation tasks are divided into three main categories: orthographic transcription, event detection and tracking (e.g. speech vs. music, speaker tracking), and information extraction (e.g. named entity detection, topic tracking). Each category is evaluated separately. The paper gives detail about the tasks to be performed and the corpus, with a particular emphasis on the manually transcribed reference transcription.

http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2004/pdf/672.pdf

The ESTER Evaluation Campaign for the Rich Transcription of French Broadcast News

This paper describes the first version of “Transcriber”, a tool for segmenting, labeling and transcribing speech. It is developed under Unix in the Tcl/Tk script language with extensions in C, and is available as free software. The environment offers the basic functions necessary for segmenting, labeling and transcribing long duration signals. The signal editor and the text editor are integrated and synchronized in order to display and play the current segment. The output is in a standard SGML format. Multiple languages are supported. The tool can be ported to various platforms and is very flexible so that new functions can be easily added. We hope that such a portable, widely available and flexible tool will benefit the whole community and make it easier to develop and share corpora.

/pdf/transcriber-a-free-tool-for-segmenting-labeling-and-tvho6n51f3.pdf

Transcriber: a free tool for segmenting, labeling and transcribing speech

This paper presents the audio corpus developed in the framework of the ESTER evaluation campaign of French broadcast news transcription systems. This corpus includes 100 hours of manually annotated recordings and 1,677 hours of non transcribed data. The manual annotations include the detailed verbatim orthographic transcription, the speaker turns and identities, information about acoustic conditions, and name entities. Additional resources generated by automatic speech processing systems, such as phonetic alignments and word graphs, are also described.

/pdf/corpus-description-of-the-ester-evaluation-campaign-for-the-2kpq8452fj.pdf

Edouard Geoffrois

Papers

Transcriber: Development and use of a tool for assisting speech corpora production

The ESTER Phase II Evaluation Campaign for the Rich Transcription of French Broadcast News

The ESTER Evaluation Campaign for the Rich Transcription of French Broadcast News

Transcriber: a free tool for segmenting, labeling and transcribing speech

Corpus description of the ESTER Evaluation Campaign for the Rich Transcription of French Broadcast News