The BABEL Speech Corpus
The BABEL speech corpus is a corpus of recorded speech materials from five Central and Eastern European languages. Intended for use in speech technology applications, it was funded by a grant from the European Union and completed in 1998. It is distributed by the European Language Resources Association. Development of the BABEL Project Following the creation of a speech corpus of European Union languages by the SAM project, funding was granted by the European Union for the creation along similar lines of a speech corpus of languages of Central and Eastern Europe, with the name of BABEL. The initial impetus came from the SAM (Speech Assessment Methods) project funded by the European Union as ESPRIT Project #1541 in 1987–89. This project was conducted by an international group of phoneticians, and was applied in the first instance to the European Communities languages Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, and Italian (by 1989). SAM produced many speech research tools (including t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Central And Eastern Europe
Central and Eastern Europe is a term encompassing the countries in the Baltics, Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Southeast Europe (mostly the Balkans), usually meaning former communist states from the Eastern Bloc and Warsaw Pact in Europe. Scholarly literature often uses the abbreviations CEE or CEEC for this term. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) also uses the term "Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs)" for a group comprising some of these countries. Definitions The term ''CEE'' includes the Eastern Bloc (Warsaw Pact) countries west of the post-World War II border with the former Soviet Union; the independent states in former Yugoslavia (which were not considered part of the Eastern bloc); and the three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (which chose not to join the CIS with the other 12 former republics of the USSR). The CEE countries are further subdivided by their accession status to the European Union (EU): the eigh ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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European Union
The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been described as a '' sui generis'' political entity (without precedent or comparison) combining the characteristics of both a federation and a confederation. Containing 5.8per cent of the world population in 2020, the EU generated a nominal gross domestic product (GDP) of around trillion in 2021, constituting approximately 18per cent of global nominal GDP. Additionally, all EU states but Bulgaria have a very high Human Development Index according to the United Nations Development Programme. Its cornerstone, the Customs Union, paved the way to establishing an internal single market based on standardised legal framework and legislation that applies in all member states in those matters, and only those matters, where the states have agreed to act ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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European Language Resources Association
The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a not-for-profit organisation established under the law of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Its seat is in Luxembourg and its headquarters is in Paris, France. Activities Since its founding in 1995, the European Language Resources Association has been a conduit for the distribution of speech, written, and terminology language resources (LRs) for human language technology (HLT), a key component of information society technologies (IST) In order to do so, a number of technical and logistic, commercial (prices, fees, royalties), legal (licensing, intellectual property rights, management), and information dissemination issues had to be addressed. ELRA broadening its objectives and responsibilities towards the HLT community over the years, and is now also involved in the production, or commissioning of the production, of language resources through a number of initiatives, and actively committed to the evaluation of language-engineeri ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Lori Lamel
Lori Faith Lamel is a speech processing researcher known for her work with the TIMIT corpus of American English speech and for her work on voice activity detection, speaker recognition, and other non-linguistic inferences from speech signals. She works for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) as a senior research scientist in the Spoken Language Processing Group of the Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur. Education and career Lamel was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering and computer science in 1980 as a co-op student with Bell Labs. She earned her Ph.D. at MIT in 1988, with the dissertation ''Formalizing Knowledge used in Spectrogram Reading: Acoustic and perceptual evidence from stops'' supervised by Victor Zue. She completed a habilitation in 2004 at Paris-Sud University. She was a visiting researcher at CNRS in 198 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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SAMPA
__NOTOC__ The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printable ASCII characters, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It was originally developed in the late 1980s for six European languages by the EEC ESPRIT information technology research and development program. As many symbols as possible have been taken over from the IPA; where this is not possible, other signs that are available are used, e.g. @.html" ;"title="code>@">code>@for schwa (IPA ), 2.html" ;"title="code>2">code>2for the vowel sound found in French ''deux'' (IPA ), and 9.html" ;"title="code>9">code>9for the vowel sound found in French ''neuf'' (IPA ). Today, officially, SAMPA has been developed for all the sounds of the following languages: The characters "s{mp@.html" ;"title="code>"s{mp@">code>"s{mp@represent the pronunciation of the name SAMPA in English, with the initial symbol indicating primary stress. Like IPA, SAMPA is usual ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bulgarian Language
Bulgarian (, ; bg, label=none, български, bălgarski, ) is an Eastern South Slavic language spoken in Southeastern Europe, primarily in Bulgaria. It is the language of the Bulgarians. Along with the closely related Macedonian language (collectively forming the East South Slavic languages), it is a member of the Balkan sprachbund and South Slavic dialect continuum of the Indo-European language family. The two languages have several characteristics that set them apart from all other Slavic languages, including the elimination of case declension, the development of a suffixed definite article, and the lack of a verb infinitive. They retain and have further developed the Proto-Slavic verb system (albeit analytically). One such major development is the innovation of evidential verb forms to encode for the source of information: witnessed, inferred, or reported. It is the official language of Bulgaria, and since 2007 has been among the official languages of the Eur ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Estonian Language
Estonian ( ) is a Finnic language, written in the Latin script. It is the official language of Estonia and one of the official languages of the European Union, spoken natively by about 1.1 million people; 922,000 people in Estonia and 160,000 outside Estonia. Classification Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family. The Finnic languages also include Finnish and a few minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea and in northwestern Russia. Estonian is subclassified as a Southern Finnic language and it is the second-most-spoken language among all the Finnic languages. Alongside Finnish, Hungarian and Maltese, Estonian is one of the four official languages of the European Union that are not of an Indo-European origin. From the typological point of view, Estonian is a predominantly agglutinative language. The loss of word-final sounds is extensive, and this has made its inflectional morphology markedly more fusional, especially with respect to no ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Hungarian Language
Hungarian () is an Uralic language spoken in Hungary and parts of several neighbouring countries. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Outside Hungary, it is also spoken by Hungarian communities in southern Slovakia, western Ukraine ( Subcarpathia), central and western Romania (Transylvania), northern Serbia (Vojvodina), northern Croatia, northeastern Slovenia (Prekmurje), and eastern Austria. It is also spoken by Hungarian diaspora communities worldwide, especially in North America (particularly the United States and Canada) and Israel. With 17 million speakers, it is the Uralic family's largest member by number of speakers. Classification Hungarian is a member of the Uralic language family. Linguistic connections between Hungarian and other Uralic languages were noticed in the 1670s, and the family itself (then called Finno-Ugric) was established in 1717. Hungarian has traditionally been assigned to the Ugric alo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Polish Language
Polish (Polish: ''język polski'', , ''polszczyzna'' or simply ''polski'', ) is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic group written in the Latin script. It is spoken primarily in Poland and serves as the native language of the Poles. In addition to being the official language of Poland, it is also used by the Polish diaspora. There are over 50 million Polish speakers around the world. It ranks as the sixth most-spoken among languages of the European Union. Polish is subdivided into regional dialects and maintains strict T–V distinction pronouns, honorifics, and various forms of formalities when addressing individuals. The traditional 32-letter Polish alphabet has nine additions (''ą'', ''ć'', ''ę'', ''ł'', ''ń'', ''ó'', ''ś'', ''ź'', ''ż'') to the letters of the basic 26-letter Latin alphabet, while removing three (x, q, v). Those three letters are at times included in an extended 35-letter alphabet, although they are not used in native words. The traditional ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Romanian Language
Romanian (obsolete spellings: Rumanian or Roumanian; autonym: ''limba română'' , or ''românește'', ) is the official and main language of Romania and the Moldova, Republic of Moldova. As a minority language it is spoken by stable communities in the countries surrounding Romania (Romanians in Bulgaria, Bulgaria, Romanians in Hungary, Hungary, Romanians of Serbia, Serbia, and Romanians in Ukraine, Ukraine), and by the large Romanian diaspora. In total, it is spoken by 28–29 million people as an First language, L1+Second language, L2, of whom 23–24 millions are native speakers. In Europe, Romanian is rated as a medium level language, occupying the tenth position among thirty-seven Official language, official languages. Romanian is part of the Eastern Romance languages, Eastern Romance sub-branch of Romance languages, a linguistic group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin which separated from the Italo-Western languages, Western Romance languages in the co ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Peter Roach (phonetician)
Peter John Roach (born 30 June 1943) is a British retired phonetician. He taught at the Universities of Leeds and Reading, and is best known for his work on the pronunciation of British English. Education Peter Roach studied Classics at the Priory Grammar School for Boys, Shrewsbury. At Oxford University (Brasenose College, 1962–1966) he took Classical Honour Moderations before graduating in psychology and philosophy (PPP). He studied teaching English overseas at Manchester University then went on to University College London to take a postgraduate course in phonetics. Later, while a lecturer at the University of Reading, he completed a PhD which was awarded in 1978. Career From 1968 to 1978 he was Lecturer in Phonetics at the University of Reading, UK, and for the academic year 1975–1976 was ''Profesor Encargado de Curso'' in the Department of English at the University of Seville, Spain, on leave from Reading University. He moved to the University of Leeds in 1978, init ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Phonetics Works
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines based on the research questions involved such as how humans plan and execute movements to produce speech (articulatory phonetics), how various movements affect the properties of the resulting sound (acoustic phonetics), or how humans convert sound waves to linguistic information (auditory phonetics). Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone—a speech sound in a language which differs from the phonological unit of phoneme; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones. Phonetics deals with two aspects of human speech: production—the ways humans make sounds—and perception—the way speech is understood. The communicative modalit ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |