Rapid Language Portability for Speech Processing Systems

October 17, 2008
Alan W Black | Carnegie Mellon University

With the growing demand for speech processing systems in many different languages, there is still a significant bottleneck in building recognition and synthesis support for new languages. The SPICE project is aimed at providing web-based easy-to-use tools for the non-expert to build acoustic and language models for speech recognition and synthesis systems in new languages. This work has required new research in better selection of prompting data, lexicon construction and multilingual acoustic modeling. Where possible synthesis and recognition models are shared.

This talk gives an overview of the system, and highlights the specific research issues that have been addressed and what still needs to be done. The system has already been used successfully for some 25 languages.

(joint work with Tanja Schultz)

Speaker Details

Alan W Black is an Associate Professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He previously worked in the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh, and before that at ATR in Japan. He is one of the principal authors of the free software Festival Speech Synthesis System, the FestVox voice building tools and CMU Flite, a small footprint speech synthesis engine. He received his PhD in Computational Linguistics from Edinburgh University in 1993, his MSc in Knowledge Based Systems also from Edinburgh in 1986, and a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from Coventry University in 1984.Although much of his core research focuses on speech synthesis, he also works in real-time hands-free speech-to-speech translation systems (Croatian, Arabic and Thai), spoken dialog systems, and rapid language adaptation for support of new languages. Alan W Black was an elected member of the IEEE Speech Technical Committee (2003-2007). He is currently on the board of ISCA and on the editorial board of Speech Communications. He was program chair of the ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop 2004, and was general co-chair of Interspeech 2006 – ICSLP. In 2004, with Prof Keiichi Tokuda, he initiated the now annual Blizzard Challenge, the largest multi-site evaluation of corpus-based speech synthesis techniques.