Toomas Altosaar


2010

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A Speech Corpus for Modeling Language Acquisition: CAREGIVER
Toomas Altosaar | Louis ten Bosch | Guillaume Aimetti | Christos Koniaris | Kris Demuynck | Henk van den Heuvel
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

A multi-lingual speech corpus used for modeling language acquisition called CAREGIVER has been designed and recorded within the framework of the EU funded Acquisition of Communication and Recognition Skills (ACORNS) project. The paper describes the motivation behind the corpus and its design by relying on current knowledge regarding infant language acquisition. Instead of recording infants and children, the voices of their primary and secondary caregivers were captured in both infant-directed and adult-directed speech modes over four languages in a read speech manner. The challenges and methods applied to obtain similar prompts in terms of complexity and semantics across different languages, as well as the normalized recording procedures employed at different locations, is covered. The corpus contains nearly 66000 utterance based audio files spoken over a two-year period by 17 male and 17 female native speakers of Dutch, English, Finnish, and Swedish. An orthographical transcription is available for every utterance. Also, time-aligned word and phone annotations for many of the sub-corpora also exist. The CAREGIVER corpus will be published via ELRA.

2004

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Design of an Interactive Web-based User Interface for Speech Database Query Formation
Toomas Altosaar | Matti Karjalainen
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04)

2000

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Object-oriented Access to the Estonian Phonetic Database
Einar Meister | Arvo Eek | Toomas Altosaar | Martti Vainio
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’00)