The present report is submitted in response to General Assembly resolution 61/106, by which the Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Optional Protocol thereto. As requested by the Assembly, a brief overview of the status of the Convention as at 3 August 2007 is presented. The report also contains a brief description of technical arrangements on staff and facilities made necessary for the effective performance of the functions of the Conference of States Parties and the Committee under the Convention and the Optional Protocol, and a description on the progressive implementation of standards and guidelines for the accessibility of facilities and services of the United Nations system. Recent efforts of the United Nations and agencies to disseminate information on the Convention and the Optional Protocol are also described.

わかりやすい障害者の権利条約 : 知的障害のある人の権利のために = Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities

我的台灣, 看見心靈的故鄉 =2009林磐聳藝術與設計展

▶ Addresses the accessibility, usability, and, ultimately, acceptability of Information Society Technologies by anyone, anywhere, at anytime, and through any media and device. ▶ Focuses on theoretical, methodological, and empirical research, of both technological and non-technological nature. ▶ Features papers that report on theories, methods, tools, empirical results, reviews, case studies, and best-practice examples.

Universal access in the information society

The goal of this work is to recognise phrases and sentences being spoken by a talking face, with or without the audio. Unlike previous works that have focussed on recognising a limited number of words or phrases, we tackle lip reading as an open-world problem &#x2013; unconstrained natural language sentences, and in the wild videos. Our key contributions are: (1) a Watch, Listen, Attend and Spell (WLAS) network that learns to transcribe videos of mouth motion to characters, (2) a curriculum learning strategy to accelerate training and to reduce overfitting, (3) a Lip Reading Sentences (LRS) dataset for visual speech recognition, consisting of over 100,000 natural sentences from British television. The WLAS model trained on the LRS dataset surpasses the performance of all previous work on standard lip reading benchmark datasets, often by a significant margin. This lip reading performance beats a professional lip reader on videos from BBC television, and we also demonstrate that if audio is available, then visual information helps to improve speech recognition performance.

https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2017/papers/Chung_Lip_Reading_Sentences_CVPR_2017_paper.pdf

Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild

We present the first gesture recognition system implemented end-to-end on event-based hardware, using a TrueNorth neurosynaptic processor to recognize hand gestures in real-time at low power from events streamed live by a Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS). The biologically inspired DVS transmits data only when a pixel detects a change, unlike traditional frame-based cameras which sample every pixel at a fixed frame rate. This sparse, asynchronous data representation lets event-based cameras operate at much lower power than frame-based cameras. However, much of the energy efficiency is lost if, as in previous work, the event stream is interpreted by conventional synchronous processors. Here, for the first time, we process a live DVS event stream using TrueNorth, a natively event-based processor with 1 million spiking neurons. Configured here as a convolutional neural network (CNN), the TrueNorth chip identifies the onset of a gesture with a latency of 105 ms while consuming less than 200 mW. The CNN achieves 96.5% out-of-sample accuracy on a newly collected DVS dataset (DvsGesture) comprising 11 hand gesture categories from 29 subjects under 3 illumination conditions.

/pdf/a-low-power-fully-event-based-gesture-recognition-system-5elv7phpy7.pdf

A Low Power, Fully Event-Based Gesture Recognition System

This paper describes Microsoft’s submission to the first shared task on sign language translation at WMT 2022, a public competition tackling sign language to spoken language translation for Swiss German sign language. The task is very challenging due to data scarcity and an unprecedented vocabulary size of more than 20k words on the target side. Moreover, the data is taken from real broadcast news, includes native signing and covers scenarios of long videos. Motivated by recent advances in action recognition, we incorporate full body information by extracting features from a pre-trained I3D model and applying a standard transformer network. The accuracy of the system is furtherimproved by applying careful data cleaning on the target text. We obtain BLEU scores of 0.6 and 0.78 on the test and dev set respectively, which is the best score among the participants of the shared task. Also in the human evaluation the submission reaches the first place. The BLEU score is further improved to 1.08 on the dev set by applying features extracted from a lip reading model.

Clean Text and Full-Body Transformer: Microsoft’s Submission to the WMT22 Shared Task on Sign Language Translation

This paper presents a description of INESC-ID’s Spoken Language Systems Laboratory (L 2 F) Language Verification systems submitted to the ALBAYZIN-2010 evaluation. The primary submission consists of the fusion of six individual subsystems: one Gaussian supervector approach with support vector machines that relies on the acoustic characteristics extracted by a front-end of shifted deltas, and five individual Phone Recognition and Language Modeling detectors based on five different phone tokenizers. Additionally, two contrastive systems have been developed. Language detection results have been submitted for all the evaluation conditions for every system. The main particularity of the systems developed for this evaluation is that individual language models for clean and noisy conditions have been trained for each target language. Results for the different systems and evaluation conditions are reported.

/pdf/the-l-2-f-language-verification-systems-for-albayzin-2010-15khvhz2tr.pdf

The L 2 F Language Verification Systems for Albayzin-2010 Evaluation

Sign language detection, identifying if someone is signing or not, is becoming crucially important for its applications in remote conferencing software and for selecting useful sign data for training sign language recognition or translation tasks. We argue that the current benchmark data sets for sign language detection estimate overly positive results that do not generalize well due to signer overlap between train and test partitions. We quantify this with a detailed analysis of the effect of signer overlap on current sign detection benchmark data sets. Comparing accuracy with and without overlap on the DGS corpus and Signing in the Wild, we observed a relative decrease in accuracy of 4.17% and 6.27%, respectively. Furthermore, we propose new data set partitions that are free of overlap and allow for more realistic performance assessment. We hope this work will contribute to improving the accuracy and generalization of sign language detection systems.

On the Importance of Signer Overlap for Sign Language Detection

This paper describes the winning approach in the Shared Task 3 at SwissText 2021 on Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text, a public competition on dialect recognition and translation. Swiss German refers to the multitude of Alemannic dialects spoken in the German-speaking parts of Switzerland. Swiss German differs significantly from standard German in pronunciation, word inventory and grammar. It is mostly incomprehensible to native German speakers. Moreover, it lacks a standardized written script. To solve the challenging task, we propose a hybrid automatic speech recognition system with a lexicon that incorporates translations, a 1st pass language model that deals with Swiss German particularities, a transfer-learned acoustic model and a strong neural language model for 2nd pass rescoring. Our submission reaches 46.04% BLEU on a blind conversational test set and outperforms the second best competitor by a 12% relative margin.

Dialectal Speech Recognition and Translation of Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text: Microsoft's Submission to SwissText 2021

/pdf/dialectal-speech-recognition-and-translation-of-swiss-german-1b2hszg3d1.pdf

Oscar Koller

Papers

Clean Text and Full-Body Transformer: Microsoft’s Submission to the WMT22 Shared Task on Sign Language Translation

The L 2 F Language Verification Systems for Albayzin-2010 Evaluation

On the Importance of Signer Overlap for Sign Language Detection

Dialectal Speech Recognition and Translation of Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text: Microsoft's Submission to SwissText 2021

Dialectal Speech Recognition and Translation of Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text: Microsoft's Submission to SwissText 2021 (short paper).