The Let’s Go Task and the Olympus-based Let’s Go System

Alan W Black

Alan W Black 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.

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Date

• 13:00, Tusday, November 10^th, 2009
• Room 336

Speaker

• Alan W Black, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Abstract

The purpose of this tutorial is to inform participants about the Let’s Go Bus Information task that will be used in the 2010 Spoken Dialog Challenge, and to give details of the distributed Olympus- based Let’s Go System. The information will be invaluable to those who wish to build a comparable system and to those who wish to modify the DialRC distributed Let’s Go System.

The presentation will be 2 hours. The first hour will concentrate on the task itself and how the currently installed system addresses the task. The second hour will give a detailed explanation about installing, running and modifying the Olympus-based Let’s Go system. It is assumed that the participants already have some knowledge of spoken dialog systems.

The web-based seminar will be presented twice, with one presentation time aimed at European participants, and the other aimed at Far Eastern participants (or optimally for the signed-up participants). The talk will include detailed slides, a presentation, and time for questions (time permitting). Questions can also be asked afterwards on the sdc-discuss mailing list.