REC - Speech Recognition Applied to Telecommunications

Theses

Please note: although the theses names were translated to English, all the theses mentioned below were written in Portuguese.

During the first year of the project, two "Mestrado" theses were presented in the scope of two of the tasks:

• "Automatic annotation of telephone speech", by Rui Amaral (at the time member of the IT team, Coimbra), in February 1998. The thesis' aim was the automatic segmentation and labelling of isolated digit utterances, falling therefore in the scope of task T3.
• "Automatic spoken language identification", by Diamantino Caseiro (INESC), in April 1998. The work of task T6 was mostly done in the scope of this thesis.

During the second year of the project, two "Doutoramento" theses were presented in the scope of two of the tasks:

• "Models of the perifery auditory system for automatic speech recognition", by Fernando Perdigão (IT), in June 1998 (task T3).
• "Recognition of Non-Native Speech", by Carlos Teixeira (INESC), in March 1999 (task T2).

• "Large vocabulary speech recognition for European Portuguese", by Manuel João Silva (INESC), in February 2000 (task T4).
• "Robust recognition of digits and natural numbers", by Frederico Rodrigues (INESC), in July 2000 (task T3).

Work on several other "Doutoramento" and "Mestrado" theses is currently in progress in the scope of some of the project tasks:

• Doctoral thesis of Eduardo Sá Marta (IT) on speaker independent phoneme recognition (task T1).
• Doctoral thesis of Vítor Pera (FEUP) on multi-streaming recognition techniques (task T4).
• Doctoral thesis of Rui Amaral (INESC) on spoken language topic detection, started in 1998 (task T3).

Although indirectly related with the project theme - recognition of speech over the telephone network - the Doctoral thesis of Carlos Ribeiro (INESC), entitled "Phonetic vocoding - Speech coding based on phonetically classified segments", presented in February 2000, should be also mentioned here. In fact, all the work of automatic phonetic segmentation was intimately related with the REC project.

The Master thesis of Ricardo Rodrigues (INESC) on recognition of spoken and spelled proper names, which started in 1997 (tasks T1 and T4), was interrupted by the student in March 2000, in order to pursue his professional career.