Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

Equipex ORTOLANG

• Project acronym: ORTOLANG (http://www.ortolang.fr )

• Project title: Open Resources and TOols for LANGuage

• Duration: September 2012 - May 2016 (phase I, signed in January 2013)

• Coordinator: Jean-Marie Pierrel, ATILF (Nancy)

• Other partners: LPL (Aix en Provence), LORIA (Nancy), Modyco (Paris), LLL (Orléans), INIST (Nancy)

• Abstract: The aim of ORTOLANG (Open Resources and TOols for LANGuage) is to propose a network infrastructure offering a repository of language data (corpora, lexicons, dictionaries, etc.) and tools and their treatment that are readily available and well-documented which will:

  • enable a real mutualization of analysis research, of modeling and automatic treatment of the French language;

  • facilitate the use and transfer of resources and tools set up within public laboratories towards industrial partners, in particular towards SME which often cannot develop such resources and tools for language treatment due to the costs of their realization;

  • promote the French language and local languages of France by sharing knowledge which has been acquired by public laboratories.

  Several teams of the LORIA laboratory contribute to this Equipex, mainly with respect to providing tools for speech and language processing. MULTISPEECH contributes text-speech alignment and speech visualization tools.

ANR ORFEO

• Project acronym: ORFEO (http://www.agence-nationale-recherche.fr/en/anr-funded-project/?tx_lwmsuivibilan_pi2[CODE]=ANR-12-CORP-0005 )

• Project title: Outils et Ressources pour le Français Ecrit et Oral

• Duration: February 2013 - February 2016

• Coordinator: Jeanne-Marie DEBAISIEUX (Université Paris 3)

• Other partners: ATILF, CLLE-ERSS, ICAR, LIF, LORIA, LATTICE, MoDyCo

• Abstract: The main objective of the ORFEO project is the constitution of a Corpus for the Study of Contemporary French.

In this project, we have provided so far an automatic alignment at the word and phoneme levels for audio files from the corpus TCOF (Traitement de Corpus Oraux en Français). This corpus contains mainly spontaneous speech, recorded under various conditions with a large SNR range and a lot of overlapping speech. We tested different acoustic models and different adaptation methods for the forced speech-text alignment. Other corpora are currently being processed.

ANR-DFG IFCASL

• Project acronym: IFCASL

• Project title: Individualized feedback in computer-assisted spoken language learning

• Duration: March 2013 - February 2016

• Coordinator: Jürgen Trouvain (Saarland University)

• Other partners: Saarland University (COLI department)

• Abstract: The main objective of IFCASL is to investigate learning of oral French by German speakers, and oral German by French speakers at the phonetic level.

The work has mainly focused on the design of a corpus of French sentences and text that has been recorded by German speakers learning French, recording a corpus of German sentences read by French speakers, and tools for annotating French and German corpora. Beforehand, two preliminary small corpora have been designed and recorded in order to bring to the fore the most interesting phonetic issues to be investigated in the project. In addition this preliminary work was used to test the recording devices so as to guarantee the same quality of recording in Saarbrücken and in Nancy, and to design and develop recording software.

In this project, we also provided an automatic alignment procedure at the word and phoneme levels for 4 corpora: French sentences uttered by French speakers, French sentences uttered by German speakers, German sentences uttered by French speakers, German sentences uttered by German speakers.

ANR ContNomina

• Project acronym: ContNomina

• Project title: Exploitation of context for proper names recognition in diachronic audio documents

• Duration: February 2013 - July 2016

• Coordinator: Irina Illina (Loria)

• Other partners: LIA, Synalp

• Abstract: the project ContNomina focuses on the problem of proper names in automatic audio processing systems by exploiting in the most efficient way the context of the processed documents. To do this, the project addresses:

  • the statistical modeling of contexts and of relationships between contexts and proper names;

  • the contextualization of the recognition module through the dynamic adjustment of the lexicon and of the language model in order to make them more accurate and certainly more relevant in terms of lexical coverage, particularly with respect to proper names;

  • the detection of proper names, on the one hand, in text documents for building lists of proper names, and on the other hand, in the output of the recognition system to identify spoken proper names in the audio/video data.

FUI RAPSODIE

• Project acronym: RAPSODIE (http://erocca.com/rapsodie )

• Project title: Automatic Speech Recognition for Hard of Hearing or Handicapped People

• Duration: March 2012 - February 2016 (signed in December 2012)

• Coordinator: eRocca (Mieussy, Haute-Savoie)

• Other partners: CEA (Grenoble), Inria (Nancy), CASTORAMA (France)

• Abstract: The goal of the project is to realize a portable device that will help a hard of hearing person to communicate with other people. To achieve this goal the portable device will embed a speech recognition system, adapted to this task. Another application of the device will be environment vocal control for handicapped persons.

In this project, MULTISPEECH is involved for optimizing the speech recognition models for the envisaged task, and contributes also to finding the best way of presenting the speech recognition results in order to maximize the communication efficiency between the hard of hearing person and the speaking person.

ADT FASST

The Action de Développement Technologique Inria (ADT) FASST (2012–2014) was conducted by PAROLE in collaboration with the teams PANAMA and TEXMEX of Inria Rennes. It reimplemented into efficient C++ code the Flexible Audio Source Separation Toolbox (FASST) originally developed in Matlab by the METISS team of Inria Rennes. This enabled the application of FASST on larger data sets, and its use by a larger audience. The new C++ version was released in January 2014. Two modules were also developed for HTK and Kaldi in order to perform noise robust speech recognition by uncertainty decoding.

ADT VisArtico

The technological Development Action (ADT) Inria Visartico (2013–2015) aims at developing and improving VisArtico, an articulatory vizualisation software. In addition to improving the basic functionalities, several articulatory analysis and processing tools are being integrated. We will also work on the integration of multimodal data.