Links
Links to various sites involved with the advancement of Speech Recognition in the Middle East, the Mediterranian and around the world.
NETWORKS
ELSNET The European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies. Its main objective is to advance human language technologies in a broad sense by bringing together Europe's key players in research, development, integration or deployment in the field of language and speech technology and neighbouring areas. The network's role is to offer an environment that allows for optimal exploitation of the available human and intellectual resources in order to advance the field. This environment comprises a number of structures (committees, special interest groups), actions (summer schools, workshops) and services (web site, email lists, newsletter, information dissemination, knowledge brokerage).
PROJECTS
EAGLES Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering and Speech. With widely known and broadly accepted standards, interchangeability of language technology components becomes feasible; tools can be built to accept input or produce output in standard format; resources can be designed to a standard, or be mapped into a standard form; products of one type can be compared, if they adhere to relevant standards.
ETSI European Telecommunications Standards Institute. Globally applicable standards for Information & Communications Technologies including fixed, mobile, radio, broadcast, internet, aeronautical and other areas.
Speech-Dat The project is focused on Spoken Language Resources, namely speech databases for fixed telephone networks including associated annotations and pronunciation lexica. This aims to provide unique resources which did not exist so far covering the languages Russian with 2500 speakers and, with 1000 speakers, Czech, Slovak , Polish and Hungarian. These databases will serve as an important resource for the performance of voice driven teleservice systems in practical implementations.
RESOURCES
LDC The Linguistic Data Consortium supports language-related education, research and technology development by creating and sharing linguistic resources: data, tools and standards.
ELDA Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency ELRA’s operational body, set up to identify, classify, collect, validate and produce the language resources which may be needed by the HLT – Human Language Technology – community. Besides, ELDA is involved in HLT evaluation campaigns. ELDA handles the practical and legal issues related to the distribution of language resources, provides legal advice in the field of HLT, and drafts and concludes distribution agreements on behalf of ELRA.
BAS The Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals (BAS) was founded as a public institution in January 1995 and is hosted by the University of Munich, presently at the Institut für Phonetik und Sprachverarbeitung (IPS). BAS is dedicated to make databases of spoken German accessible in a well structured form to the speech science community as well as to speech engineering.
ALPHABETS, FONTS, TOOLS
SAMPA Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet a machine-readable phonetic alphabet. It was originally developed under the ESPRIT project 1541, SAM (Speech Assessment Methods) in 1987-89 by an international group of phoneticians, and was applied in the first instance to the European Communities languages Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, and Italian (by 1989); later to Norwegian and Swedish (by 1992); and subsequently to Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish (1993). Under the BABEL project, it has now been extended to Bulgarian, Estonian, Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian (1996). Under the aegis of COCOSDA it is hoped to extend it to cover many other languages (and in principle all languages).
The Unicode Consortium Enables people around the world to use computers in any language. Our members develop the Unicode Standard, Unicode Locales (CLDR), and other standards. These specifications form the foundation for software internationalization in all major operating systems, search engines, applications, and the Web.