Spoken audio data, such as interview data, is a scientific instrument used by researchers in various disciplines crossing the boundaries of social sciences and humanities. In this paper, we will have a closer look at a portal designed to perform speech-to-text conversion on audio recordings through Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in the CLARIN infrastructure. Within the cluster cross-domain EU project SSHOC the potential value of such a linguistic tool kit for processing spoken language recording has found uptake in a webinar about the topic, and in a task addressing audio analysis of panel survey data. The objective of this contribution is to show that the processing of interviews as a research instrument has opened up a fascinating and fruitful area of collaboration between Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH).

CLARIN is a European Research Infrastructure providing access to digital language resources and tools from across Europe and beyond to researchers in the humanities and social sciences. This paper focuses on CLARIN as a platform for the sharing of language resources. It zooms in on the service offer for the aggregation of language repositories and the value proposition for a number of communities that benefit from the enhanced visibility of their data and services as a result of integration in CLARIN. The enhanced findability of language resources is serving the social sciences and humanities (SSH) community at large and supports research communities that aim to collaborate based on virtual collections for a specific domain. The paper also addresses the wider landscape of service platforms based on language technologies which has the potential of becoming a powerful set of interoperable facilities to a variety of communities of use.

This paper introduces a new CLARIN Knowledge Center which is the K-Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise (ACE for short) which has been established at the Centre for Language and Speech Technology (CLST) at Radboud University. Atypical communication is an umbrella term used here to denote language use by second language learners, people with language disorders or those suffering from language disabilities, but also more broadly by bilinguals and users of sign languages. It involves multiple modalities (text, speech, sign, gesture) and encompasses different developmental stages. ACE closely collaborates with The Language Archive (TLA) at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in order to safeguard GDPR-compliant data storage and access. We explain the mission of ACE and show its potential on a number of showcases and a use case.

Corpora of disordered speech (CDS) are costly to collect and difficult to share due to personal data protection and intellectual property (IP) issues. In this contribution we discuss the legal grounds for processing CDS in the light of the GDPR, and illustrate these with two use cases from the DELAD context. One use case deals with clinical datasets and another with legacy data from Polish hearing-impaired children. For both cases, processing based on consent and on public interest are taken into consideration.

In this paper we present a first version of a transcription portal for audio files based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) in various languages. The portal is implemented in the CLARIN resources research network and intended for use by non-technical scholars. We explain the background and interdisciplinary nature of interview data, the perks and quirks of using ASR for transcribing the audio in a research context, the dos and don’ts for optimal use of the portal, and future developments foreseen. The portal is promoted in a range of workshops, but there are a number of challenges that have to be met. These challenges concern privacy issues, ASR quality, and cost, amongst others.

In sources used in oral history research (such as interviews with eye witnesses), passages where the degree of personal emotional involvement is found to be high can be of particular interest, as these may give insight into how historical events were experienced, and what moral dilemmas and psychological or religious struggles were encountered. In a pilot study involving a large corpus of interview recordings with Dutch war veterans, we have investigated if it is possible to develop a method for automatically identifying those passages where the degree of personal emotional involvement is high. The method is based on the automatic detection of exceptionally large silences and filled pause segments (using Automatic Speech Recognition), and cues taken from specific n-grams. The first results appear to be encouraging enough for further elaboration of the method.

This paper describes the process of semi-automatically converting dictionaries from paper to structured text (database) and the integration of these into the CLARIN infrastructure in order to make the dictionaries accessible and retrievable for the research community. The case study at hand is that of the curation of 42 fascicles of the Dictionaries of the Brabantic and Limburgian dialects, and 6 fascicles of the Dictionary of dialects in Gelderland.

We present a new speech database containing 18.5 hours of annotated radio broadcasts in the Frisian language. Frisian is mostly spoken in the province Fryslan and it is the second official language of the Netherlands. The recordings are collected from the archives of Omrop Fryslan, the regional public broadcaster of the province Fryslan. The database covers almost a 50-year time span. The native speakers of Frisian are mostly bilingual and often code-switch in daily conversations due to the extensive influence of the Dutch language. Considering the longitudinal and code-switching nature of the data, an appropriate annotation protocol has been designed and the data is manually annotated with the orthographic transcription, speaker identities, dialect information, code-switching details and background noise/music information.

In the context of ongoing developments as regards the creation of a sustainable, interoperable language resource infrastructure and spreading ideas of the need for open access, not only of research publications but also of the underlying data, various issues present themselves which require that different stakeholders reconsider their positions. In the present paper we relate the experiences from the CLARIN-NL data curation service (DCS) over the two years that it has been operational, and the future role we envisage for expertise centres like the DCS in the evolving infrastructure.

The VALID Data Archive is an open multimedia data archive (under construction) with data from speakers suffering from language impairments. We report on a pilot project in the CLARIN-NL framework in which five data resources were curated. For all data sets concerned, written informed consent from the participants or their caretakers has been obtained. All materials were anonymized. The audio files were converted into wav (linear PCM) files and the transcriptions into CHAT or ELAN format. Research data that consisted of test, SPSS and Excel files were documented and converted into CSV files. All data sets obtained appropriate CMDI metadata files. A new CMDI metadata profile for this type of data resources was established and care was taken that ISOcat metadata categories were used to optimize interoperability. After curation all data are deposited at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen where persistent identifiers are linked to all resources. The content of the transcriptions in CHAT and plain text format can be searched with the TROVA search engine.

We present a web-based tool for retrieving and annotating audio fragments of e.g. interviews. Our collection contains 250 interviews with veterans of Dutch conflicts and military missions. The audio files of the interviews were disclosed using ASR technology focussed at keyword retrieval. Resulting transcripts were stored in a MySQL database together with metadata, summary texts, and keywords, and carefully indexed. Retrieved fragments can be made audible and annotated. Annotations can be kept personal or be shared with other users. The tool and formats comply with CLARIN standards. A demo version of the tool is available at http://wwwlands2.let.kun.nl/spex/annotationtooldemo.

In this paper we present the first freely available corpus of Dutch text messages containing data originating from the Netherlands and Flanders. This corpus has been collected in the framework of the SoNaR project and constitutes a viable part of this 500-million-word corpus. About 53,000 text messages were collected on a large scale, based on voluntary donations. These messages will be distributed as such. In this paper we focus on the data collection processes involved and after studying the effect of media coverage we show that especially free publicity in newspapers and on social media networks results in more contributions. All SMS are provided with metadata information. Looking at the composition of the corpus, it becomes visible that a small number of people have contributed a large amount of data, in total 272 people have contributed to the corpus during three months. The number of women contributing to the corpus is larger than the number of men, but male contributors submitted larger amounts of data. This corpus will be of paramount importance for sociolinguistic research and normalisation studies.

This paper deals with the task of large vocabulary proper name recognition. In order to accomodate a wide diversity of possible name pronunciations (due to non-native name origins or speaker tongues) a multilingual acoustic model is combined with a lexicon comprising 3 grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) transcriptions from G2P transcribers for 3 different languages) and up to 4 so-called phoneme-to-phoneme (P2P) transcriptions. The latter are generated with (speaker tongue, name source) specific P2P converters that try to transform a set of baseline name transcriptions into a pool of transcription variants that lie closer to the `true’ name pronunciations. The experimental results show that the generated P2P variants can be employed to improve name recognition, and that the obtained accuracy is comparable to what is achieved with typical (TY) transcriptions (made by a human expert). Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the P2P conversion can best be instantiated from a baseline transcription in the name source language, and that knowledge of the speaker tongue is an important input as well for the P2P transcription process.

Enhanced Publications are a new way to publish scientific and other results in an electronic article. The advantage of EPs is that the relation between the article and the underlying data facilitate the peer review process and other quality assessment activities. Due to the link between de publication and the research data the publication can be much richer than a paper edition permits. We present an example of EPs in which links are made to interview fragments that include transcripts, audio segments, annotations and metadata. EPs call for a new paradigm of research methodology in which digital persistent access to research data are a central issue. In this contribution we highlight 1. The research data as it is archived and curated, 2. the concept ""enhanced publication"" and its scientific value, 3. the ""fragment fitter tool"", a language processing tool to facilitate the creation of EPs, 4. IPR issues related to the re-use of the interview data.

In The Low Countries, a major reference corpus for written Dutch is being built. We discuss the interplay between data acquisition and data processing during the creation of the SoNaR Corpus. Based on developments in traditional corpus compiling and new web harvesting approaches, SoNaR is designed to contain 500 million words, balanced over 36 text types including both traditional and new media texts. Beside its balanced design, every text sample included in SoNaR will have its IPR issues settled to the largest extent possible. This data collection task presents many challenges because every decision taken on the level of text acquisition has ramifications for the level of processing and the general usability of the corpus. As far as the traditional text types are concerned, each text brings its own processing requirements and issues. For new media texts - SMS, chat - the problem is even more complex, issues such as anonimity, recognizability and citation right, all present problems that have to be tackled. The solutions actually lead to the creation of two corpora: a gigaword SoNaR, IPR-cleared for research purposes, and the smaller - of commissioned size - more privacy compliant SoNaR, IPR-cleared for commercial purposes as well.

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.

Research into spoken language has become more visual over the years. Both fundamental and applied research have progressively included gestures, gaze, and facial expression. Corpora of multi-modal conversational speech are rare and frequently difficult to use due to privacy and copyright restrictions. A freely available annotated corpus is presented, gratis and libre, of high quality video recordings of face-to-face conversational speech. Annotations include orthography, POS tags, and automatically generated phonemes transcriptions and word boundaries. In addition, labeling of both simple conversational function and gaze direction has been a performed. Within the bounds of the law, everything has been done to remove copyright and use restrictions. Annotations have been processed to RDBMS tables that allow SQL queries and direct connections to statistical software. From our experiences we would like to advocate the formulation of “best practises” for both legal handling and database storage of recordings and annotations.

In the Autonomata project we have collected a corpus of spoken name utterances with manually corrected phonemic transcriptions of these utterances. The corpus was designed with the intention to become a major resource for the development of automatic speech recognition engines that can achieve a high accuracy on the recognition of person and geographical names spoken in Dutch. The recorded names were selected so as to reveal the major pronunciation variations that a speech recognizer of e.g. a navigation system with speech input is going to be confronted with. This includes native speakers speaking foreign names and vice versa.

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.

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.

The traditional dialect vocabulary of the Netherlands and Flanders is recorded and researched in several Dutch and Belgian research institutes and universities. Most of these distributed dictionary creation and research projects collaborate in the “Permanent Overlegorgaan Regionale Woordenboeken” (ReWo). In the project “digital databases and digital tools for WBD and WLD” (D-square) the dialect data published by two of these dictionary projects (Woordenboek van de Brabantse Dialecten and Woordenboek van de Limburgse Dialecten) is being digitised. One of the additional goals of the D-square project is the development of an infrastructure for electronic access to all dialect dictionaries collaborating in the ReWo. In this paper we will firstly reconsider the nature of the core data types - form, sense and location - present in the different dialect dictionaries and the ways these data types are further classified. Next we will focus on the problems encountered when trying to unify this dictionary data and their classifications and suggest solutions. Finally we will look at several implementation issues regarding a specific encoding for the dictionaries.

It is acknowledged that a good phonemic transcription of proper names is imperative for the success of many modern speech-based services such as directory assistance, car navigation, etc. It is also known that state-of-the-art general-purpose grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) converters perform rather poorly on many name categories. This paper proposes to use a g2p-p2p tandem comprising a state-of-the-art general-purpose g2p converter that produces an initial transcription and a name category specific phoneme-to-phoneme (p2p) converter that aims at correcting the mistakes made by the g2p converter. The main body of the paper describes a novel methodology for the automatic construction of the p2p converter. The methodology is implemented in a software toolbox that will be made publicly available in a form that will permit the user to design a p2p converter for an arbitrary name category. To give a proof of concept, the toolbox was used for the development of three p2p converters for first names, surnames and geographical names respectively. The obtained systems are small (few rules) and effective: significant improvements (up to 50% relative) of the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion are obtained. These encouraging results call for a further development and improvement of the approach.

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 deals with the quality evaluation (validation) of Spoken Language Resources (SLR). The current situation in terms of relevant validation criteria and procedures is briefly presented. Next, a number of validation issues related to new data formats (XML-based annotations, UTF-16 encoding) are discussed. Further, new validation cycles that were introduced in a series of new projects like SpeeCon and OrienTel are addressed: prompt sheet validation, lexicon validation and pre-release validation. Finally, SPEX's current and future

In the past, fundamental linguistic research was typically conducted on small data sets that were handcrafted for the specific research at hand. However, from the eighties onwards, many large spoken language corpora have become available. This study investigates the usefulness of large multi-purpose spoken language corpora for fundamental linguistic research. A research task was designed in which we tried to capture the major pronunciation differences between three speech styles in context-sensitive re-write rules at the phone level. These re-write rules were extracted from the alignments of both a manual phonetic transcription and an automatic phonetic transcription with a canonical reference transcription of the same material.

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.