Abstract Control over voice quality, eg breathy and tense voice, is important for speech synthesi... more Abstract Control over voice quality, eg breathy and tense voice, is important for speech synthesis applications. For example, transformations can be used to modify aspects of the voice related to speaker's identity and to improve expressiveness. However, it is hard to modify voice characteristics of the synthetic speech, without degrading speech quality.
We present a method for predicting the midsagittal tongue contour from the locations of a few lan... more We present a method for predicting the midsagittal tongue contour from the locations of a few landmarks (metal pellets) on the tongue surface, as used in articulatory databases such as MOCHA and the Wisconsin XRDB. Our method learns a mapping using ground-truth tongue contours derived from ultrasound data and drastically improves over spline interpolation.
Abstract It has recently become possible to record any small meeting using a laptop equipped with... more Abstract It has recently become possible to record any small meeting using a laptop equipped with a plug-and-play USB microphone array. We show the potential for such recordings in a personal aid that allows project managers to record their meetings and, when reviewing them afterwards through a standard calendar interface, to find relevant documents on their computer. This interface is intended to supplement or replace the textual searches that managers typically perform.
Abstract As digital video becomes ubiquitous in both the home and workplace, the development and ... more Abstract As digital video becomes ubiquitous in both the home and workplace, the development and evaluation of tools to manipulate such video is clearly important. Tools to find camera cuts in digital video allow higher level tools to build on this functionality, although cuts can be difficult to find and a lot of object motion can sometimes be mistaken for a cut with some methods.
In this paper, we investigate the use of confidence measures for the evaluation of pronunciation ... more In this paper, we investigate the use of confidence measures for the evaluation of pronunciation models and the employment of these evaluations in an automatic baseform learning process. The confidence measures and pronunciation models are obtained from the ABBOT hybrid Hidden Markov Model/Artificial Neural Network (HMM/ANN) Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) system [8].
Abstract This paper describes a spoken document retrieval system, combining the ABBOT large vocab... more Abstract This paper describes a spoken document retrieval system, combining the ABBOT large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) system developed by Cambridge University, Sheffield University and SoftSound, and the PRISE information retrieval engine developed by NIST. The system was constructed to enable us to participate in the TREC 6 Spoken Document Retrieval experimental evaluation.
ABSTRACT The Ambient Spotlight is a prototype system based on personal meeting capture using a la... more ABSTRACT The Ambient Spotlight is a prototype system based on personal meeting capture using a laptop and a portable microphone array. The system automatically recognises and structures the meeting content using automatic speech recognition, topic segmentation and extractive summarisation. The recognised speech in the meeting is used to construct queries to automatically link meeting segments to other relevant material, both multimodal and textual.
The UEDIN Systems for the IWSLT 2012 Evaluation Eva Hasler, Peter Bell, Arnab Ghoshal, Barry Hadd... more The UEDIN Systems for the IWSLT 2012 Evaluation Eva Hasler, Peter Bell, Arnab Ghoshal, Barry Haddow, Philipp Koehn, Fergus McInnes, Steve Renals, Pawel Swietojanski School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK {e. hasler, peter. bell, fergus. mcinnes, s. renals}@ ed. ac. uk, {aghoshal, pkoehn, bhaddow}@ inf. ed. ac. uk, p. swietojanski@ sms. ed. ac. uk Abstract This paper describes the University of Edinburgh (UEDIN) systems for the IWSLT 2012 Evaluation.
Abstract Multiparty meetings are a ubiquitous feature of organizations, and there are considerabl... more Abstract Multiparty meetings are a ubiquitous feature of organizations, and there are considerable economic benefits that would arise from their automatic analysis and structuring. In this paper, we are concerned with the segmentation and structuring of meetings (recorded using multiple cameras and microphones) into sequences of group meeting actions such as monologue, discussion and presentation.
Abstract In this paper, we investigate the combination of complementary acoustic feature streams ... more Abstract In this paper, we investigate the combination of complementary acoustic feature streams in large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR). We have explored the use of acoustic features obtained using a pitch-synchronous analysis, Straight, in combination with conventional features such as Mel frequency cepstral coefficients. Pitch-synchronous acoustic features are of particular interest when used with vocal tract length normalization (VTLN) which is known to be affected by the fundamental frequency.
Abstract Speech-based human-computer interaction faces several difficult challenges in order to b... more Abstract Speech-based human-computer interaction faces several difficult challenges in order to be more widely accepted. One of the challenges in spoken dialogue management is to control the dialogue flow (dialogue strategy) in an efficient and natural way. Dialogue strategies designed by humans are prone to errors, labour-intensive and non-portable, making automatic design an attractive alternative.
Abstract This paper investigates the automatic segmentation of meetings into a sequence of group ... more Abstract This paper investigates the automatic segmentation of meetings into a sequence of group actions or phases. Our work is based on a corpus of multiparty meetings collected in a meeting room instrumented with video cameras, lapel microphones and a microphone array. We have extracted a set of feature streams, in this case extracted from the audio data, based on speaker turns, prosody and a transcript of what was spoken.
This paper addresses the problem of dialogue optimization on large search spaces. For such a purp... more This paper addresses the problem of dialogue optimization on large search spaces. For such a purpose, in this paper we propose to learn dialogue strategies using multiple Semi-Markov Decision Processes and hierarchical reinforcement learning. This approach factorizes state variables and actions in order to learn a hierarchy of policies. Our experiments are based on a simulated flight booking dialogue system and compare flat versus hierarchical reinforcement learning.
In this paper we report on a series of experiments investigating the path from text-summarisation... more In this paper we report on a series of experiments investigating the path from text-summarisation to style-specific summarisation of spoken news stories. We show that the portability of traditional text summarisation features to broadcast news is dependent on the diffusiveness of the information in the broadcast news story.
ABSTRACT We describe our work on developing a speech recognition system for multi-genre media arc... more ABSTRACT We describe our work on developing a speech recognition system for multi-genre media archives. The high diversity of the data makes this a challenging recognition task, which may benefit from systems trained on a combination of in-domain and out-of-domain data. Working with tandem HMMs, we present Multi-level Adaptive Networks (MLAN), a novel technique for incorporating information from out-of-domain posterior features using deep neural networks.
Abstract. In this paper we describe the 2005 AMI system for the transcription of speech in meetin... more Abstract. In this paper we describe the 2005 AMI system for the transcription of speech in meetings used in the 2005 NIST RT evaluations. The system was designed for participation in the speech to text part of the evaluations, in particular for transcription of speech recorded with multiple distant microphones and independent headset microphones. System performance was tested on both conference room and lecture style meetings.
In this paper we define a number of confidence measures derived from an acceptor HMM and evaluate... more In this paper we define a number of confidence measures derived from an acceptor HMM and evaluate their performance for the task of utterance verification using the North American Business News (NAB) and Broadcast News (BN) corpora. Results are presented for decodings made at both the word and phone level which show the relative profitability of rejection provided by the diverse set of confidence measures.
Abstract Control over voice quality, eg breathy and tense voice, is important for speech synthesi... more Abstract Control over voice quality, eg breathy and tense voice, is important for speech synthesis applications. For example, transformations can be used to modify aspects of the voice related to speaker's identity and to improve expressiveness. However, it is hard to modify voice characteristics of the synthetic speech, without degrading speech quality.
We present a method for predicting the midsagittal tongue contour from the locations of a few lan... more We present a method for predicting the midsagittal tongue contour from the locations of a few landmarks (metal pellets) on the tongue surface, as used in articulatory databases such as MOCHA and the Wisconsin XRDB. Our method learns a mapping using ground-truth tongue contours derived from ultrasound data and drastically improves over spline interpolation.
Abstract It has recently become possible to record any small meeting using a laptop equipped with... more Abstract It has recently become possible to record any small meeting using a laptop equipped with a plug-and-play USB microphone array. We show the potential for such recordings in a personal aid that allows project managers to record their meetings and, when reviewing them afterwards through a standard calendar interface, to find relevant documents on their computer. This interface is intended to supplement or replace the textual searches that managers typically perform.
Abstract As digital video becomes ubiquitous in both the home and workplace, the development and ... more Abstract As digital video becomes ubiquitous in both the home and workplace, the development and evaluation of tools to manipulate such video is clearly important. Tools to find camera cuts in digital video allow higher level tools to build on this functionality, although cuts can be difficult to find and a lot of object motion can sometimes be mistaken for a cut with some methods.
In this paper, we investigate the use of confidence measures for the evaluation of pronunciation ... more In this paper, we investigate the use of confidence measures for the evaluation of pronunciation models and the employment of these evaluations in an automatic baseform learning process. The confidence measures and pronunciation models are obtained from the ABBOT hybrid Hidden Markov Model/Artificial Neural Network (HMM/ANN) Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) system [8].
Abstract This paper describes a spoken document retrieval system, combining the ABBOT large vocab... more Abstract This paper describes a spoken document retrieval system, combining the ABBOT large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) system developed by Cambridge University, Sheffield University and SoftSound, and the PRISE information retrieval engine developed by NIST. The system was constructed to enable us to participate in the TREC 6 Spoken Document Retrieval experimental evaluation.
ABSTRACT The Ambient Spotlight is a prototype system based on personal meeting capture using a la... more ABSTRACT The Ambient Spotlight is a prototype system based on personal meeting capture using a laptop and a portable microphone array. The system automatically recognises and structures the meeting content using automatic speech recognition, topic segmentation and extractive summarisation. The recognised speech in the meeting is used to construct queries to automatically link meeting segments to other relevant material, both multimodal and textual.
The UEDIN Systems for the IWSLT 2012 Evaluation Eva Hasler, Peter Bell, Arnab Ghoshal, Barry Hadd... more The UEDIN Systems for the IWSLT 2012 Evaluation Eva Hasler, Peter Bell, Arnab Ghoshal, Barry Haddow, Philipp Koehn, Fergus McInnes, Steve Renals, Pawel Swietojanski School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK {e. hasler, peter. bell, fergus. mcinnes, s. renals}@ ed. ac. uk, {aghoshal, pkoehn, bhaddow}@ inf. ed. ac. uk, p. swietojanski@ sms. ed. ac. uk Abstract This paper describes the University of Edinburgh (UEDIN) systems for the IWSLT 2012 Evaluation.
Abstract Multiparty meetings are a ubiquitous feature of organizations, and there are considerabl... more Abstract Multiparty meetings are a ubiquitous feature of organizations, and there are considerable economic benefits that would arise from their automatic analysis and structuring. In this paper, we are concerned with the segmentation and structuring of meetings (recorded using multiple cameras and microphones) into sequences of group meeting actions such as monologue, discussion and presentation.
Abstract In this paper, we investigate the combination of complementary acoustic feature streams ... more Abstract In this paper, we investigate the combination of complementary acoustic feature streams in large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR). We have explored the use of acoustic features obtained using a pitch-synchronous analysis, Straight, in combination with conventional features such as Mel frequency cepstral coefficients. Pitch-synchronous acoustic features are of particular interest when used with vocal tract length normalization (VTLN) which is known to be affected by the fundamental frequency.
Abstract Speech-based human-computer interaction faces several difficult challenges in order to b... more Abstract Speech-based human-computer interaction faces several difficult challenges in order to be more widely accepted. One of the challenges in spoken dialogue management is to control the dialogue flow (dialogue strategy) in an efficient and natural way. Dialogue strategies designed by humans are prone to errors, labour-intensive and non-portable, making automatic design an attractive alternative.
Abstract This paper investigates the automatic segmentation of meetings into a sequence of group ... more Abstract This paper investigates the automatic segmentation of meetings into a sequence of group actions or phases. Our work is based on a corpus of multiparty meetings collected in a meeting room instrumented with video cameras, lapel microphones and a microphone array. We have extracted a set of feature streams, in this case extracted from the audio data, based on speaker turns, prosody and a transcript of what was spoken.
This paper addresses the problem of dialogue optimization on large search spaces. For such a purp... more This paper addresses the problem of dialogue optimization on large search spaces. For such a purpose, in this paper we propose to learn dialogue strategies using multiple Semi-Markov Decision Processes and hierarchical reinforcement learning. This approach factorizes state variables and actions in order to learn a hierarchy of policies. Our experiments are based on a simulated flight booking dialogue system and compare flat versus hierarchical reinforcement learning.
In this paper we report on a series of experiments investigating the path from text-summarisation... more In this paper we report on a series of experiments investigating the path from text-summarisation to style-specific summarisation of spoken news stories. We show that the portability of traditional text summarisation features to broadcast news is dependent on the diffusiveness of the information in the broadcast news story.
ABSTRACT We describe our work on developing a speech recognition system for multi-genre media arc... more ABSTRACT We describe our work on developing a speech recognition system for multi-genre media archives. The high diversity of the data makes this a challenging recognition task, which may benefit from systems trained on a combination of in-domain and out-of-domain data. Working with tandem HMMs, we present Multi-level Adaptive Networks (MLAN), a novel technique for incorporating information from out-of-domain posterior features using deep neural networks.
Abstract. In this paper we describe the 2005 AMI system for the transcription of speech in meetin... more Abstract. In this paper we describe the 2005 AMI system for the transcription of speech in meetings used in the 2005 NIST RT evaluations. The system was designed for participation in the speech to text part of the evaluations, in particular for transcription of speech recorded with multiple distant microphones and independent headset microphones. System performance was tested on both conference room and lecture style meetings.
In this paper we define a number of confidence measures derived from an acceptor HMM and evaluate... more In this paper we define a number of confidence measures derived from an acceptor HMM and evaluate their performance for the task of utterance verification using the North American Business News (NAB) and Broadcast News (BN) corpora. Results are presented for decodings made at both the word and phone level which show the relative profitability of rejection provided by the diverse set of confidence measures.
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