Abusive texts are reaching the interests of the scientific and social community. How to automatically detect them is onequestion that is gaining interest in the natural language processing community. The main contribution of this paper is toevaluate the quality of the recently developed ”Spanish Database for cyberbullying prevention” for the purpose of trainingclassifiers on detecting abusive short texts. We compare classical machine learning techniques to the use of a more ad-vanced model: the contextual word embeddings in the particular case of classification of abusive short-texts for the Spanishlanguage. As contextual word embeddings, we use Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT), pro-posed at the end of 2018. We show that BERT mostly outperforms classical techniques. Far beyond the experimentalimpact of our research, this project aims at planting the seeds for an innovative technological tool with a high potentialsocial impact and aiming at being part of the initiatives in artificial intelligence for social good.

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until early 2014; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the situation of funding for LT topics. This paper documents the initiative’s work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.

This paper presents a web-based multimedia search engine built within the Buceador (www.buceador.org) research project. A proof-of-concept tool has been implemented which is able to retrieve information from a digital library made of multimedia documents in the 4 official languages in Spain (Spanish, Basque, Catalan and Galician). The retrieved documents are presented in the user language after translation and dubbing (the four previous languages + English). The paper presents the tool functionality, the architecture, the digital library and provide some information about the technology involved in the fields of automatic speech recognition, statistical machine translation, text-to-speech synthesis and information retrieval. Each technology has been adapted to the purposes of the presented tool as well as to interact with the rest of the technologies involved.

METANET4U is a European project aiming at supporting language technology for European languages and multilingualism. It is a project in the META-NET Network of Excellence, a cluster of projects aiming at fostering the mission of META, which is the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance, dedicated to building the technological foundations of a multilingual European information society. This paper describe the resources produced at our lab to provide Synthethic voices. Using existing 10h corpus for a male and a female Spanish speakers, voices have been developed to be used in Festival, both with unit-selection and with statistical-based technologies. Furthermore, using data produced for supporting research on intra and inter-lingual voice conversion, four bilingual voices (English/Spanish) have been developed. The paper describes these resources which are available through META. Furthermore, an evaluation is presented to compare different synthesis techniques, influence of amount of data in statistical speech synthesis and the effect of sharing data in bilingual voices.

LC-STAR II is a follow-up project of the EU funded project LC-STAR (Lexica and Corpora for Speech-to-Speech Translation Components, IST-2001-32216). LC-STAR II develops large lexica containing information for speech processing in ten languages targeting especially automatic speech recognition and text to speech synthesis but also other applications like speech-to-speech translation and tagging. The project follows by large the specifications developed within the scope of LC-STAR covering thirteen languages: Catalan, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Slovenian, Spanish, Standard Arabic and US-English. The ten new LC-STAR II languages are: Brazilian-Portuguese, Cantonese, Czech, English-UK, French, Hindi, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, and Urdu. The project started in 2006 with a lifetime of two years. The project is funded by a consortium, which includes Microsoft (USA), Nokia (Finland), NSC (Israel), Siemens (Germany) and Harmann/Becker (Germany). The project is coordinated by UPC (Spain) and validation is performed by SPEX (The Netherlands), and CST (Denmark). The developed language resources will be shared among partners. This paper presents a summary of the creation of word lists and lexica and an overview of adaptations of the specifications and conceptual representation model from LC-STAR to the new languages. The validation procedure will be presented too.

The goal of the LILA project was the collection of speech databases over cellular telephone networks of five languages in three Asian countries. Three languages were recorded in India: Hindi by first language speakers, Hindi by second language speakers and Indian English. Furthermore, Mandarin was recorded in China and Korean in South-Korea. The databases are part of the SpeechDat-family and follow the SpeechDat rules in many respects. All databases have been finished and have passed the validation tests. Both Hindi databases and the Korean database will be available to the public for sale.

In this paper we describe the design and production of Catalan database for building synthetic voices. Two speakers, with 10 hours per speaker, have recorded 10 hours of speech. The speaker selection and the corpus design aim to provide resources for high quality synthesis. The resources have been used to build voices for the Festival TTS. Both the original recordings and the Festival databases are freely available for research and for commertial use.

In TC-STAR a variety of Language Resources (LR) is being produced. In this contribution we address the resources that have been created for Automatic Speech Recrognition and Spoken Language Translation. As yet, these are 14 LR in total: two training SLR for ASR (English and Spanish), three development LR and three evaluation LR for ASR (English, Spanish, Mandarin), and three development LR and three evaluation LR for SLT (English-Spanish, Spanish-English, Mandarin-English). In this paper we describe the properties, validation, and availability of these resources.

This paper deals with the design of a synthesis database for a high quality corpus-based Speech Synthesis system in Spanish. The database has been designed for speech synthesis, speech conversion and expressive speech. The design follows the specifications of TC-STAR project and has been applied to collect equivalent English and Mandarin synthesis databases. The sentences of the corpus have been selected mainly from transcribed speech and novels. The selection criterion is a phonetic and prosodic coverage. The corpus was completed with sentences specifically designed to cover frequent phrases and words. Two baseline speakers and four bilingual speakers were recorded. Recordings consist of 10 hours of speech for each baseline speaker and one hour of speech for each voice conversion bilingual speaker. The database is labelled and segmented. Pitch marks and phonetic segmentation was done automatically and up to 50% manually supervised. The database will be available at ELRA.

This paper describes a joint initiative of the Catalan and Spanish Government to produce Language Resources for the Catalan language. A similar methodology to the Basic Language Resource Kit (BLARK) concept was applied to determine the priorities on the production of the Language Resources. The paper shows the LR and tools currently available for the Catalan Language both for Language and Speech technologies. The production of large databases for Automatic Speech Recognition purposes already started. All the resources generated in the project follow EU standards, will be validated by an external centre and will be free and public available through ELRA.

In the framework of the EU funded project TC-STAR (Technology and Corpora for Speech to Speech Translation),research on TTS aims on providing a synthesized voice sounding like the source speaker speaking the target language. To progress in this direction, research is focused on naturalness, intelligibility, expressivity and voice conversion both, in the TC-STAR framework. For this purpose, specifications on large, high quality TTS databases have been developed and the data have been recorded for UK English, Spanish and Mandarin. The development of speech technology in TC-STAR is evaluation driven. Assessment of speech synthesis is needed to determine how well a system or technique performs in comparison to previous versions as well as other approaches (systems & methods). Apart from testing the whole system, all components of the system will be evaluated separately. This approach grants better assesment of each component as well as identification of the best techniques in the different speech synthesisprocesses.This paper describes the specifications of Language Resources for speech synthesis and the specifications for evaluation of speech synthesis activities.

The SALA II project comprises mobile telephone recordings according to the SpeechDat (II) paradigm for several languages in North and Latin America. Each database contains the recordings of 1000 speakers, with the exception of US Spanish (2000 speakers) and US English (4000 speakers). A quarter of the recordings of each database are made respectively in a quiet environment (home/office), in the street, in a public place, and in a moving vehicle. This paper presents an evaluation of the project. The paper details on experiences with respect to the implementation of design specifications, speaker recruitment, data recordings (on site), data processing, orthographic transcription and lexicon generation. Furthermore, the validation procedure and its results are documented. Finally, the availability and distribution of the databases are addressed.

The goal of this project (LILA) is the collection of a large number of spoken databases for training Automatic Speech Recognition Systems for telephone applications in the Asian Pacific area. Specifications follow those of SpeechDat-like databases. Utterances will be recorded directly from calls made either from fixed or cellular telephones and are composed by read text and answers to specific questions. The project is driven by a consortium composed by a large number of industrial companies. Each company is in charge of the production of two databases. The consortium shares the databases produced in the project. The goal of the project should be reached within the year 2005.

This paper presents specifications and requirements for creation and validation of large lexica that are needed in automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-to-Speech (TTS) and statistical Speech-to-Speech Translation (SST) systems. The prepared language resources are created and validated within the scope of the EU-project LC-STAR (Lexica and Corpora for Speech-to-Speech Translation Components) during years 2002-2005. Large lexica consisting of phonetic, suprasegmental and morpho-syntactic content will be provided with well-documented specifications for 13 languages. A short summary of the LC-STAR project itself is presented. Overview about the specification for the corpora collection and word extraction as well as the specification and format of the lexica are presented. Particular attention is paid to the validation of the produced lexica and the lessons learnt during pre-validation. The created and validated language resources will be available via ELRA/ELDA.