ERCIM News No.26 - July 1996 - INESC
INESC's Speech Processing Group
by Isabel Trancoso
The Speech Processing group at INESC is actively involved in the
fields of coding (specially high-quality medium-to-low bit rate coding),
recognition and synthesis.
This activity has been internationally recognized through intense involvement
in European Projects and close cooperation with prestigious institutions
such as AT&T Bell Laboratories (New Jersey, U.S.A.). At a national level,
the group has a formal cooperation agreement with the Centre of Linguistics
of the University of Lisbon (CLUL), having jointly developed the first Text-to-Speech
synthesizer build from scratch for European Portuguese (DIXI). The cooperation
with the Neural Network and the Natural Language Processing groups of INESC
is also quite active.
Since the Portuguese integration in the EC, the group has participated very
intensively in European projects, focusing on the ESPRIT Programme (ESPRIT-II
SUNSTAR - Integration and design of speech understanding interfaces and
ESPRIT-III SAMA - Speech Technology Assessment in Multilingual Applications)
and the LRE (ONOMASTICA - Multi-Language Pronounciation of Proper Names
and Place Names and RELATOR - a European Network of Repositaries for Linguistic
Resources). It has also participated in EUREKA (High Quality Coding) and
COST (Applications of Digital Signal Processing to Communications). The
group also developed a national project to design a prototype of a recognition/synthesis
system in the Portuguese language applied to database queries over the telephone
network.
The Speech Processing group is currently participating in several projects,
namely the ESPRIT Network in Language and Speech, where INESC acts as one
of the managing nodes, being involved in the Linguistic Resources task group
and, related to this, the HCM-ELSNET Project on Phrase Level Phonology and
Dialogue and Discourse. Other European projects include the LRE Project
Speechdat and the Telematics Project VODIS - Advanced Speech Technologies
for Voice Operated Driver Information Systems. Nationally, the group is
active in the projects BDFALA - Spoken Corpus of European Portuguese, and
EDIFALA - Vocal Aids for the Motor and Speech Handicapped: integration of
Text-to-Speech Synthesis in a Text Editor.
The group is also launching a new electronic journal on Language and Speech,
devoted to papers from students, the 'Student Journal of Language and Speech'.
The journal has the active support of ELSNET, ESCA (the European Speech
Communication Association) and EACL (the European Chapter of the Association
of Computational Linguists).
The new electronic journal is intended as a means for rapid dissemination
of ideas and results from research students working within the fields of
study and the geographical area covered by the three sponsoring institutions
and has a training role for new researchers.
Given the wide coverage of the journal in terms of scientific areas, 9 very
broad classes were selected: SRS - speech recognition and synthesis; NLUG
- natural language understanding and generation; LI - language identification;
IER - information extraction and retrieval; DMC - dialogue modelling and
control; MLPP - models of language perception and production; SM - stochastic
modelling; GCLD - grammars, corpora, lexicons1 and databases; SAS - system
assessment strategies. The web address is:
http://web-sls.essex.ac.uk/web-sls/
Please contact:
Isabel Trancoso - INESC
Tel: +351 1 3100268
E-mail: imt@elis.inesc.pt
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