View source for PoSTPort (POrting Speech Technologies to other varieties of Portuguese)

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Sponsored by: FCT (PTDC/PLP/72404/2006)<br/> 
Start: January 2008<br/>
End: December 2010

== News ==

== Team ==

Project Leader: [[Isabel Trancoso]] 
* [[Alberto Abad Gareta|Alberto Abad]]
* [[António Serralheiro]] 
* [[João Paulo Neto|João Neto]] 
* [[Luís Caldas de Oliveira|Luís Oliveira]] 
* [[Fernando Batista]] 
* [[Rui Amaral]] 
* [[Ricardo Ribeiro]]
* [[Maria do Céu Viana|M. Céu Viana]] (CLUL Coordinator)  
* [http://www.clul.ul.pt/english/equipa/amalia_mendes.php Amália Mendes]  (CLUL)
* [http://www.clul.ul.pt/english/equipa/ernesto_andrade.php Ernesto d'Andrade]  (CLUL)
* [[Helena Moniz]] (INESC-ID/CLUL)
* [[Nelson Neto]] (Scholarship 2008)
* [[Puneet Sahani]] (Scholarship 2008)
* [[Oscar Koller]] (Scholarship 2009-2010)
* [[Ana Ruth Bittencourt]] (Scholarship 2009)
* [[Ângela Costa]] (Scholarship 2010-2011)

Undergraduate Students: 
* [[Mónica Abreu]] (2008)

== Summary ==

The goal of this project is porting spoken language technologies originally developed for European Portuguese to other varieties of Portuguese, namely those spoken in South-American and African countries.
The two main spoken language technologies that will be investigated are text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversion, commonly known as synthesis and recognition. Instead of porting complete systems, we shall concentrate on the linguistically relevant modules, that are likely to be most affected. The main task of this proposal, therefore, is structured in terms of modules which will be ported and evaluated independently as much as possible.
Prior to this main work, however, the project will involve two tasks. In the first one, we shall build the pilot corpus necessary for studying the main linguistic differences and porting to the new varieties. In the second task, we shall characterize the main differences between the studied varieties, starting with the orthographic and syntactic levels, and ending with the phonetic and phonological levels. As an outcome of this task, we shall attempt to define a phonetic alphabet that encompasses all varieties of Portuguese.
The fourth task concerns the automatic identification of spoken varieties of Portuguese. This is an important goal by itself and also relevant as a pre-processing stage for switching among recognition systems developed for
specific varieties. We plan to implement this identification module by exploring different types of cues, such as phonotactic, acoustic and prosodic ones.
The four tasks of the proposal combine linguistic, signal processing and natural language processing knowledge, thus reflecting the importance of an interdisciplinary team.

== Workplan ==

* T1 - Pilot Corpus collection
* T2 - Characterization of main differences
* T3 - Porting spoken language modules
* T4 - Automatic identification of spoken varieties
* T5 - Management

== Publications ==

Journals:

Jean-Luc Rouas, Isabel Trancoso, Céu Viana, Mónica Abreu, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/4871.pdf  Language and variety verification on broadcast news for Portuguese], Speech Communication, Elsevier, vol. 50, n. 11, November 2008

Amália Mendes, A. Estrela (accepted for publication), Constructions with SE in African varieties of Portuguese, Phrasis, Ghent, Academia Press, pp. 83-107

Nelson Neto, Carlos Patrick, Aldebaro Klautau, Isabel Trancoso, [http://www.springerlink.com/content/4308855010668m51/ Free Tools and Resources for Brazilian Portuguese Speech Recognition], Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 53-68, November 2010, Springer.

Fernando Batista, Helena Moniz, Isabel Trancoso, Nuno Mamede, Bilingual Experiments on Automatic Recovery of Capitalization and Punctuation of Automatic Speech Transcripts, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing .

Invited talks:

Isabel Trancoso, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/5682.pdf A Broadcast News Processing Chain for Several Varieties of Portuguese], In XXVII Simpósio Brasileiro de Telecomunicações, Brazilian Telecommunications Society, Blumenau, Brazil, September 2009.

Isabel Trancoso, Processing Broadcast News for Several Varieties of Portuguese, LTI Seminar, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA, February 2010.

Isabel Trancoso, The Broadcast News Pipeline, ISSC - International Symposium on Speech Communication, Japan, June 2010.

Isabel Trancoso, Como transcrever uma palestra TED?, TEDxISTtagus, July 2010.

International conferences:

M. Nascimento, A. Estrela, A. Mendes, L. Pereira, On the use of comparable corpora of African varieties of Portuguese for linguistic description and teach
ing/learning applications, In Proc. Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora, LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco, May 2008

Alberto Abad, Isabel Trancoso, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/5161.pdf The L2F language verification systems for Albayzin-08 evaluation], In V Jornadas en Tecnología del Habla, November 2008

Patrick Silva, Nelson Neto, Aldebaro Klautau, André Adami, Isabel Trancoso, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/5153.pdf Speech Recognition for Brazilian Portuguese using the Spoltech and OGI-22 Corpora], In  XXVI SIMPOSIO BRASILEIRO DE TELECOMUNICACOES, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, September 2008

Jean-Luc Rouas, Isabel Trancoso, Céu Viana, Mónica Abreu, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/4820.pdf Portuguese Variety Identification on Broadcast News], In ICASSP 2008 - Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, IEEE, Las Vegas, USA, April 2008

Fernando Batista, Isabel Trancoso, Nuno Mamede, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/5568.pdf Automatic Punctuation and Capitalization for Iberian Languages], In I Joint SIG-IL/Microsoft Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages, Porto Salvo, Portugal, September 2009 (Best Student Paper Award)

Plínio Barbosa, Céu Viana, Isabel Trancoso, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/5683.pdf Cross-variety Rhythm Typology in Portuguese], In Interspeech 2009, Brighton, UK, September 2009

Helena Moniz, Isabel Trancoso, A.I. Mata da Silva, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/5641.pdf Classification of disfluent phenomena as fluent communicative devices in specific prosodic contexts], In Interspeech 2009, ISCA, pages 1719-1722, Brighton, UK, September 2009

Alberto Abad, Isabel Trancoso, Nelson Neto, Céu Viana, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/5612.pdf Porting an European Portuguese Broadcast News Recognition System to Brazilian Portuguese], In Interspeech 2009, ISCA, Brighton, UK, September 2009

Fernando Batista, Isabel Trancoso, Nuno Mamede, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/5761.pdf Comparing Automatic Rich Transcription for Portuguese, Spanish and English Broadcast News], In ASRU - IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop, Merano, Italy, December 2009

Helena Moniz, Fernando Batista, Hugo Meinedo, Alberto Abad, Isabel Trancoso, Ana Isabel Mata da Silva, Nuno J. Mamede, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/6335.pdf Prosodically-based automatic segmentation and punctuation], Speech Prosody 2010, May. 2010

Oscar Koller, Alberto Abad, Isabel Trancoso, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/6385.pdf Exploiting variety-dependent Phones in Portuguese Variety Identification], Odyssey 2010 The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop , June 2010

Fernando Batista, Helena Moniz, Isabel Trancoso, Hugo Meinedo, Ana Isabel Mata da Silva, Nuno J. Mamede, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/6467.pdf Extending the punctuation module for European Portuguese], Proc. of Interspeech 2010, September 2010

Oscar Koller, Alberto Abad, Isabel Trancoso, Céu Viana,  [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/6565.pdf Exploiting Variety-Dependent Phones in Portuguese Variety Identification Applied to Broadcast News Transcription], Interspeech 2010, September 2010

Alberto Abad and Isabel Trancoso, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/6731.pdf Post-evaluation analysis and improvements with the L2F Language Verification System submitted to NIST LRE 2009], Fala2010, Vigo, Spain, November 2010

Hugo Meinedo, Alberto Abad, Thomas Pellegrini, Isabel Trancoso, João Paulo Neto, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/6729.pdf The L2F Broadcast News Speech Recognition System], Fala2010, November 2010

Alberto Abad, Oscar Koller, Isabel Trancoso, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/6730.pdf The L2F Language Verification Systems for Albayzin-2010 Evaluation], Fala2010, Vigo, Spain, November 2010

José Lopes, Isabel Trancoso, Rui Correia, Thomas Pellegrini, Hugo Meinedo, Nuno J. Mamede, Maxine Eskenazi, [http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/7183.pdf Multimedia Learning Materials], IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop, Berkeley, USA, December 2010

Helena Moniz, Fernando Batista, Isabel Trancoso, Ana Isabel Mata da Silva,  Analysis of interrogatives in different domains, In Towards Autonomous, Adaptive, and Context-Aware Multimodal Interfaces: Theoretical and Practical Issues. Third COST 2102 International Training School, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, pages 136-148, Caserta, Italy, January 2011

Helena Moniz, Ana Isabel Mata da Silva, Isabel Trancoso, 
[http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/7167.pdf Prosodic analysis of
disfluent events in a corpus of university lectures], In VLSP 2011, New Tools
and Methods for Very-Large-Scale Phonetics Research Workshop, The University
of Pennsylvania, pages 86-87, Philadelphia, January 2011

Luís Marujo, Nuno Grazina, Tiago Luís, Wang Ling, Luísa Coheur, Isabel Trancoso,
[http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/7268.pdf BP2EP - Adaptation of Brazilian Portuguese texts to European Portuguese], In
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Association for Machine
Translation, European Association for Machine Translation, pages 129-136,
Leuven, Belgium, May 2011 7268

== Demos ==

This [http://www.l2f.inesc-id.pt/projects/postport/DEMO_FLASH/2008_09_09-08_59_02-JornaldaRecord-70.html demo] shows our current Broadcast News recognizer for Brazilian Portuguese.

 
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