The general principles of Bayesian data analysis imply that models for survey responses should be constructed conditional on all variables that affect the probability of inclusion and nonresponse, which are also the variables used in survey weighting and clustering. However, such models can quickly become very complicated, with potentially thousands of poststratification cells. It is then a challenge to develop general families of multilevel probability models that yield reasonable Bayesian inferences. We discuss in the context of several ongoing public health and social surveys. This work is currently open-ended, and we conclude with thoughts on how research could proceed to solve these problems.

Struggles with survey weighting and regression modeling

Segmentation of continuous speech into its component words is a nontrivial task for listeners. Previous work has suggested that listeners develop heuristic segmentation procedures based on experience with the structure of their language; for English, the heuristic is that strong syllables (containing full vowels) are most likely to be the initial syllables of lexical words, whereas weak syllables (containing central, or reduced, vowels) are nonword-initial, or, if word-initial, are grammatical words. This hypothesis is here tested against natural and laboratory-induced missegmentations of continuous speech. Precisely the expected pattern is found: listeners erroneously insert boundaries before strong syllables but delete them before weak syllables; boundaries inserted before strong syllables produce lexical words, while boundaries inserted before weak syllables produce grammatical words.

Rhythmic cues to speech segmentation: Evidence from juncture misperception

Developing Linguistic Corpora: a Guide to Good Practice

Maturational Constraints on Language Development

Explaining human performance in psycholinguistic tasks with models of semantic similarity based on prediction and counting : A review and empirical validation

The goal of the SpeechDat project is to develop spoken language resources for speech recognisers suited to realise voice driven teleservices. SpeechDat created speech databases for all official languages of the European Union and some major dialectal varieties and minority languages. The size of the databases ranges between 500 and 5000 speakers. In total 20 databases are recorded over the fixed telephone network, 5 databases over the cellular network, and 3 databases are designed for speaker verification. To date the project has successfully reached its end. This paper briefly describes the project, addresses the validation of the databases, their availability to consortium members and third parties, publicity and awareness, and the spin-off of the project in speech recognition research.

Speechdat multilingual speech databases for teleservices: across the finish line.

This paper describes a feasibility study into automatic recognition of Dutch dysarthric speech. Recognition experiments with speaker independent and speaker dependent models are compared, for tasks with different perplexities. The results show that speaker dependent speech recognition for dysarthric speakers is very well possible, even for higher perplexity tasks.

/pdf/automatic-recognition-of-dutch-dysarthric-speech-a-pilot-4usb59kn2g.pdf

Automatic Recognition Of Dutch Dysarthric Speech, A Pilot Study

Research into spoken language has become more visual over the years. Both fundamental and applied research have progressively included gestures, gaze, and facial expression. Corpora of multi-modal conversational speech are rare and frequently difficult to use due to privacy and copyright restrictions. A freely available annotated corpus is presented, gratis and libre, of high quality video recordings of face-to-face conversational speech. Annotations include orthography, POS tags, and automatically generated phonemes transcriptions and word boundaries. In addition, labeling of both simple conversational function and gaze direction has been a performed. Within the bounds of the law, everything has been done to remove copyright and use restrictions. Annotations have been processed to RDBMS tables that allow SQL queries and direct connections to statistical software. From our experiences we would like to advocate the formulation of "best practises" for both legal handling and database storage of recordings and annotations.

/pdf/the-ifadv-corpus-a-free-dialog-video-corpus-1vrtojhxde.pdf

The IFADV corpus: a free dialog video corpus

Within the framework of the Dutch-Flemish programme STEVIN, the JASMIN-CGN (Jongeren, Anderstaligen en Senioren in Mens-machine Interactie Corpus Gesproken Nederlands) project was carried out, which was aimed at collecting speech of children, non-natives and elderly people The JASMIN-CGN project is an extension of the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN) along three dimensions First, by collecting a corpus of contemporary Dutch as spoken by children of different age groups, elderly people and non-natives with different mother tongues, an extension along the age and mother tongue dimensions was achieved In addition, we collected speech material in a communication setting that was not envisaged in the CGN: human-machine interaction One third of the data was collected in Flanders and two thirds in the Netherlands In this paper we report on our experiences in collecting this corpus and we describe some of the important decisions that we made in the attempt to combine efficiency and high quality

/pdf/recording-speech-of-children-non-natives-and-elderly-people-26dc9w4sq7.pdf

Recording speech of children, non-natives and elderly people for HLT applications : the JASMIN-CGN corpus

A large set of spoken language resources (SLR) for various European languages is being compiled in several SpeechDat projects with the aim to train and test speech recognizers for voice driven services, mainly over telephone lines. This paper is focused on the annotation conventions applied for the Speechdat SLR. These SLR contain typical examples of short monologue speech utterances with simple orthographic transcriptions in a hierarchically simple annotation structure. The annotation conventions and their underlying principles are described and compared to approaches used for related SLR. The synchronization of the orthographic transcriptions with the corresponding speech files is addressed, and the impact of the selected approach for capturing specific phonological and phonetic phenomena is discussed. In the SpeechDat projects a number of tools have been developed to carry out the transcription of the speech. In this paper, a short description of these tools and their properties is provided. For all SpeechDat projects, an internal validity check of the databases and their annotations is carried out. The procedure of this validation campaign, the performed evaluations, and some of the results are presented.

Eric Sanders

Papers

Speechdat multilingual speech databases for teleservices: across the finish line.

Automatic Recognition Of Dutch Dysarthric Speech, A Pilot Study

The IFADV corpus: a free dialog video corpus

Recording speech of children, non-natives and elderly people for HLT applications : the JASMIN-CGN corpus

Annotation in the SpeechDat Projects