WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS
(((( WE APOLOGISE TO THOSE WHO RECEIVE MULTIPLE COPIES OF THIS ))))
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SPEECH DATABASE DEVELOPMENT FOR CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
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Wednesday, May 27th, 14.30 - 19.00
This workshop, which is held in conjunction with the First International
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation in Granada, Spain, will
be concerned with the design, production and transcription standards
required for the construction of speech databases for languages of Central
and Eastern Europe.
Speech databases have been produced for a number of the world's
major languages, but most languages of Central and Eastern Europe have
received little attention in international terms until recently, though
they are of major importance for the future of European speech science.
There are special issues which arise in the production of representative
samples of these languages, and this workshop will attempt to address
these issues. The BABEL project (funded by the European Union under the
COPERNICUS programme, project #1304) has been working on these issues
since 1995, and will soon complete a database of Bulgarian, Estonian,
Hungarian, Polish and Romanian. The work of the project will be reported
at the workshop, and aspects of the project will be the subject of
practical demonstrations, but it is hoped that papers will be contributed
by other interested researchers who are not associated with the project.
Information about BABEL can be read on its WWW pages:
http://www.linguistics.rdg.ac.uk/speechlab/research/babel
Information about the main conference can be read at:
http://www.icp.inpg.fr/ELRA/conflre.html
ORGANISING COMMITTEE
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Peter Roach, University of Reading, UK (BABEL Project Coordinator)
Klara Vicsi, Technical University, Budapest
Lori Lamel, LIMSI, Paris
CONTACT PERSON
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Peter Roach, Department of Linguistic Science, University of Reading,
Reading RG6 6AA, UK.
Tel: (+44) 118 931 8138 Fax: (+44) 118 9753365
email: p.j.roach@reading.ac.uk
WORKSHOP TOPICS
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We hope that the following topics can be considered in the workshop; this
list is not exclusive, however.
(1) Recording techniques and standards
(2) Available software tools
(3) Annotation, transcription and labelling
(4) Automated time-alignment of labels
(5) Phonetic problems of specific languages of Central and Eastern Europe
(6) Quality control
(7) RequirementS for larger-scale databases
(8) Dissemination of data; recording further languages; possibilities for
future collaboration.
THE WORKSHOP WILL CONCLUDE WITH A DISCUSSION OF THE POSSIBILITY OF
FORMING AN INFORMAL ASSOCIATION OF RESEARCHERS SPECIALISING IN THE
SPOKEN FORMS OF CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES.
SUBMITTING A PAPER
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You are invited to send an abstract of around 250 words to Peter Roach
at the above address, before February 27th. You will be notified within
two weeks if the offer of a paper has been accepted.
The limit on papers is 4000 words or 10 pages. Details of the required
format will be sent with notification of acceptance.
The deadline for submission of the completed paper is Friday, April 10th.