Finished projects

1 January, 2004 - 31 December, 2010

SEMA

Semantic description of audio with applications in audio-mining, interactive multimedia and brain research

This project builds on the results of the MAMI project, but it tries to extend the content analysis to the level of semantic descriptions of music. Such descriptions are closer to the way humans express how they perceive the music in terms of affections (sad, happy, romantic, etc.)

1 January, 2007 - 31 December, 2010

TELEX

Combining acoustic TEmplates and LEXical modeling

This FWO-funded project aims at combining bottom-up phonetic recognition and long span example based recognition into a single speech recognition architecture that beats mainstream state-of-the-art HMM systems in terms of accuracy, be it at a higher computational cost. The project runs in collaboration with KULeuven.

1 February, 2008 - 30 September, 2010

AUTONOMATA Too

Automata for deriving phoneme transcriptions of Dutch and Flemish names, Transfer of output

This STEVIN project is about the investigation of new pronunciation modeling technologies that can improve the automatic recognition of spoken names in the context of a POI (Point-of-Interest) information providing business service. Collaboration with RU (Nijmegen), UiL (Utrecht), Nuance and TeleAtlas.

1 September, 2008 - 31 August, 2010

MuziK

Muziek op maat van de Klant

This IWT funded project runs in close collaboration with Aristo Music, a company that is specialized in creating music channels that meet the desires of the customer. In order to accomplish its objective, the company must have access to a very large music database and to annotations that were made for each song in that database. In the past, these annotations were created manually by musical experts, but this method is too time consuming and expensive to scale up to the ever growing database sizes.

1 July, 2008 - 1 December, 2009

NEON

Dutch Subtitling

The STEVIN demonstration project aims at facilitating the creation of TV-captions by means of speech technology. This project runs in collaboration with Telecats, UTwente, KULeuven, UAntwerp, VRT and NOS.

1 October, 2001 - 30 September, 2009

MAMI

Musical Audio Mining

Since more and more music consumers have larger and larger music collections, and since buying and downloading (legally) of music from the internet will become more and more the standard way of acquiring music, it is important to develop new search methods for making relevant selections (e.g. Playlists) of a large collection. Obviously, one can store title of the song, name of the composer, etc. but based on advanced signal processing techniques one is presently investigating the development of more natural and flexible search methods. One such technique is query by imitation.

1 March, 2005 - 28 February, 2009

SPACE

Speech algorithms for clinical and educational applications

This IWT-SBO project is about the application of automatic speech recognition and synthesis techniques for the assessment of pathological voices (dysarthry, speech of the deaf, etc.) and for the assessment of pronunciation and reading proficiency of students (dyslexia, non-natives)

1 May, 2006 - 30 September, 2008

N-BEST

Dutch Benchmark Evaluaton of Speech recognition Technology

This STEVIN project is coordinated by TNO Utrecht and is about the setting up of a large-scale benchmark for speech recognition in Dutch, and with participation of different research groups in the Netherlands (Nijmegen, Twente, Delft), Flanders (Gent, Leuven) and abroad (TU-Brno and LIMSI)

1 June, 2005 - 31 May, 2007

AUTONOMATA

In many modern applications such as directory assistance, name dialing, car navigation, etc. one needs a speech recognizer and/or a speech synthesizer. The former to recognize spoken user commands and the latter to pronounce information found in a database. Both components make use of phonetic transcriptions of the words to recognize/pronounce. In order to develop an application, the developer needs a tool that accepts words/sentences and that returns the phonetic transcriptions of these words/sentences.

1 January, 2001 - 31 December, 2004

ACCENT - Pronunciation Modeling

This research aimed at modeling pronunciation variations for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) at the level of the lexicon (as opposite to a modeling at the level of the acoustic models). We developed a data-driven technique for upgrading a lexicon of reference pronunciations to one with multiple pronunciation variants per entry of the reference lexicon. The approach is based on the following basic principles: