ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Manually Annotated Resource for the Investigation of Nasal Grunts (2020)

This paper presents an annotation framework for nasal grunts of the whole French CID corpus (Bertrand et al., 2008). The acoustic components under scrutiny are justified and the annotation guidelines are described. We carefully characterise the acoustic cues and visual cues followed by the annotator, especially for non-modal phonation types. The conventions followed for the annotation of interactional and positional properties of grunts are explained. The resulting datasets after data extraction with Praat scripts (Boersma and Weenink, 2019) are analysed with R (R Core Team, 2017), focusing on duration. We analyse the effect of non-modal phonation (especially ingressive phonation) on duration and discuss a specialisation of grunts observed in the CID for grunts with ingressive phonation. The more general aim of this research is to establish putative core and additive properties of grunts and a tentative typology of grunts in spoken interactions.
The Objective and Subjective Sleepiness Voice Corpora (2020)

Following patients with chronic sleep disorders involves multiple appointments between doctors and patients which often results in episodic follow-ups with unevenly spaced interviews. Speech technologies and virtual doctors can help improve this follow-up. However, there are still some challenges to overcome: sleepiness measurements are diverse and are not always correlated, and most past research focused on detecting nstantaneous sleepiness levels of healthy sleep-deprived subjects. This article presents a large database to assess the sleepiness level of highly phenotyped patients that complain from excessive daytime sleepiness. Based on the Multiple Sleep Latency Test, it differs from existing databases by multiple aspects. First, it is omposed of recordings from patients suffering from excessive daytime sleepiness instead of sleep deprived healthy subjects. Second, it incites the subjects to sleep contrary to existing stressing sleepiness deprivation experimental paradigms. Third, the sleepiness level of the patients is evaluated with different temporal granularities - long term sleepiness and short term sleepiness - and both objective and subjective sleepiness measures are collected. Finally, it relies on the recordings of 94 highly phenotyped patients, allowing to unravel the influences of different physical factors (age, sex, weight, ... ) on voice.
Open-source Multi-speaker Corpora of the English Accents in the British Isles (2020)

This paper presents a dataset of transcribed high-quality audio of English sentences recorded by volunteers speaking with different accents of the British Isles. The dataset is intended for linguistic analysis as well as use for speech technologies. The recording scripts were curated specifically for accent elicitation, covering a variety of phonological phenomena and providing a high phoneme coverage. The scripts include pronunciations of global locations, major airlines and common personal names in different accents; and native speaker pronunciations of local words. Overlapping lines for all speakers were included for idiolect elicitation, which include the same or similar lines with other existing resources such as the CSTR VCTK corpus and the Speech Accent Archive to allow for easy comparison of personal and regional accents. The resulting corpora include over 31 hours of recordings from 120 volunteers who self-identify as native speakers of Southern England, Midlands, Northern England, Welsh, Scottish and Irish varieties of English.
TV-AfD: An Imperative-Annotated Corpus from The Big Bang Theory and Wikipedia`s Articles for Deletion Discussions (2020)

In this study, we created an imperative corpus with speech conversations from dialogues in The Big Bang Theory and with the written comments in Wikipedia`s Articles for Deletion discussions. For the TV show data, 59 episodes containing 25,076 statements are used. We manually annotated imperatives based on the annotation guideline adapted from Condoravdi and Lauer`s study (2012) and used the retrieved data to assess the performance of syntax-based classification rules. For the Wikipedia AfD comments data, we first developed and leveraged a syntax-based classifier to extract 10,624 statements that may be imperative, and we manually examined the statements and then identified true positives. With this corpus, we also examined the performance of the rule-based imperative detection tool. Our result shows different outcomes for speech (dialogue) and written data. The rule-based classification performs better in the written data in precision (0.80) compared to the speech data (0.44). Also, the rule-based classification has a low-performance overall for speech data with the precision of 0.44, recall of 0.41, and f-1 measure of 0.42. This finding implies the syntax-based model may need to be adjusted for a speech dataset because imperatives in oral communication have greater syntactic varieties and are highly context-dependent.
A Large Scale Speech Sentiment Corpus (2020)

We present a multimodal corpus for sentiment analysis based on the existing Switchboard-1 Telephone Speech Corpus released by the Linguistic Data Consortium. This corpus extends the Switchboard-1 Telephone Speech Corpus by adding sentiment labels from 3 different human annotators for every transcript segment. Each sentiment label can be one of three options: positive, negative, and neutral. Annotators are recruited using Google Cloud`s data labeling service and the labeling task was conducted over the internet. The corpus contains a total of 49500 labeled speech segments covering 140 hours of audio. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest multimodal Corpus for sentiment analysis that includes both speech and text features.
SibLing Corpus of Russian Dialogue Speech Designed for Research on Speech Entrainment (2020)

The paper presents a new corpus of dialogue speech designed specifically for research in the field of speech entrainment. Given that the degree of accommodation may depend on a number of social factors, the corpus is designed to encompass 5 types of relations between the interlocutors: those between siblings, close friends, strangers of the same gender, strangers of the other gender, strangers of which one has a higher job position and greater age. Another critical decision taken in this corpus is that in all these social settings one speaker is kept the same. This allows us to trace the changes in his/her speech depending on the interlocutor. The basic set of speakers consists of 10 pairs of same-gender siblings (including 4 pairs of identical twins) aged 23-40, and each of them was recorded in the 5 settings mentioned above. In total we obtained 90 dialogues of 25-60 minutes each. The speakers played a card game and a map game; they were recorded in a soundproof studio without being able to see each other due to a non-transparent screen between them. The corpus contains orthographic, phonetic and prosodic annotation and is segmented into turns and inter-pausal units.
SMASH Corpus: A Spontaneous Speech Corpus Recording Third-person Audio Commentaries on Gameplay (2020)

Developing a spontaneous speech corpus would be beneficial for spoken language processing and understanding. We present a speech corpus named the SMASH corpus, which includes spontaneous speech of two Japanese male commentators that made third-person audio commentaries during the gameplay of a fighting game. Each commentator ad-libbed while watching the gameplay with various topics covering not only explanations of each moment to convey the information on the fight but also comments to entertain listeners. We made transcriptions and topic tags as annotations on the recorded commentaries with our two-step method. We first made automatic and manual transcriptions of the commentaries and then manually annotated the topic tags. This paper describes how we constructed the SMASH corpus and reports some results of the annotations.
Improving Speech Recognition for the Elderly: A New Corpus of Elderly Japanese Speech and Investigation of Acoustic Modeling for Speech Recognition (2020)

In an aging society like Japan, a highly accurate speech recognition system is needed for use in electronic devices for the elderly, but this level of accuracy cannot be obtained using conventional speech recognition systems due to the unique features of the speech of elderly people. S-JNAS, a corpus of elderly Japanese speech, is widely used for acoustic modeling in Japan, but the average age of its speakers is 67.6 years old. Since average life expectancy in Japan is now 84.2 years, we are constructing a new speech corpus, which currently consists of the utterances of 221 speakers with an average age of 79.2, collected from four regions of Japan. In addition, we expand on our previous study (Fukuda, 2019) by further investigating the construction of acoustic models suitable for elderly speech. We create new acoustic models and train them using a combination of existing Japanese speech corpora (JNAS, S-JNAS, CSJ), with and without our {\textquoteleft}super-elderly' speech data, and conduct speech recognition experiments. Our new acoustic models achieve word error rates (WER) as low as 13.38{\%}, exceeding the results of our previous study in which we used the CSJ acoustic model adapted for elderly speech (17.4{\%} WER).
Preparation of Bangla Speech Corpus from Publicly Available Audio \& Text (2020)

Automatic speech recognition systems require large annotated speech corpus. The manual annotation of a large corpus is very difficult. In this paper, we focus on the automatic preparation of a speech corpus for Bangladeshi Bangla. We have used publicly available Bangla audiobooks and TV news recordings as audio sources. We designed and implemented an iterative algorithm that takes as input a speech corpus and a huge amount of raw audio (without transcription) and outputs a much larger speech corpus with reasonable confidence. We have leveraged speaker diarization, gender detection, etc. to prepare the annotated corpus. We also have prepared a synthetic speech corpus for handling out-of-vocabulary word problems in Bangla language. Our corpus is suitable for training with Kaldi. Experimental results show that the use of our corpus in addition to the Google Speech corpus (229 hours) significantly improves the performance of the ASR system.
On Construction of the ASR-oriented Indian English Pronunciation Dictionary (2020)

As a World English, a New English and a regional variety of English, Indian English (IE) has developed its own distinctive characteristics, especially phonologically, from other varieties of English. An Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system simply trained on British English (BE) /American English (AE) speech data and using the BE/AE pronunciation dictionary performs much worse when applied to IE. An applicable IEASR system needs spontaneous IE speech as training materials and a comprehensive, linguistically-guided IE pronunciation dictionary (IEPD) so as to achieve the effective mapping between the acoustic model and language model. This research builds a small IE spontaneous speech corpus, analyzes and summarizes the phonological variation features of IE, comes up with an IE phoneme set and complies the IEPD (including a common-English-word list, an Indian-word list, an acronym list and an affix list). Finally, two ASR systems are trained with 120 hours IE spontaneous speech data, using the IEPD we construct in this study and CMUdict separately. The two systems are tested with 50 audio clips of IE spontaneous speech. The result shows the system trained with IEPD performs better than the one trained with CMUdict with WER being 15.63{\%} lower on the test data.
Gender Representation in Open Source Speech Resources (2020)

With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the growing use of deep-learning architectures, the question of ethics, transparency and fairness of AI systems has become a central concern within the research community. We address transparency and fairness in spoken language systems by proposing a study about gender representation in speech resources available through the Open Speech and Language Resource platform. We show that finding gender information in open source corpora is not straightforward and that gender balance depends on other corpus characteristics (elicited/non elicited speech, low/high resource language, speech task targeted). The paper ends with recommendations about metadata and gender information for researchers in order to assure better transparency of the speech systems built using such corpora.
RSC: A Romanian Read Speech Corpus for Automatic Speech Recognition (2020)

Although many efforts have been made in the last decade to enhance the speech and language resources for Romanian, this language is still considered under-resourced. While for many other languages there are large speech corpora available for research and commercial applications, for Romanian language the largest publicly available corpus to date comprises less than 50 hours of speech. In this context, Speech and Dialogue research group releases Read Speech Corpus (RSC) {--} a Romanian speech corpus developed in-house, comprising 100 hours of speech recordings from 164 different speakers. The paper describes the development of the corpus and presents baseline automatic speech recognition (ASR) results using state-of-the-art ASR technology: Kaldi speech recognition toolkit.
FAB: The French Absolute Beginner Corpus for Pronunciation Training (2020)

We introduce the French Absolute Beginner (FAB) speech corpus. The corpus is intended for the development and study of Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) tools for absolute beginner learners. Data were recorded during two experiments focusing on using a CAPT system in paired role-play tasks. The setting grants FAB three distinguishing features from other non-native corpora: the experimental setting is ecologically valid, closing the gap between training and deployment; it features a label set based on teacher feedback, allowing for context-sensitive CAPT; and data have been primarily collected from absolute beginners, a group often ignored. Participants did not read prompts, but instead recalled and modified dialogues that were modelled in videos. Unable to distinguish modelled words solely from viewing videos, speakers often uttered unintelligible or out-of-L2 words. The corpus is split into three partitions: one from an experiment with minimal feedback; another with explicit, word-level feedback; and a third with supplementary read-and-record data. A subset of words in the first partition has been labelled as more or less native, with inter-annotator agreement reported. In the explicit feedback partition, labels are derived from the experiment`s online feedback. The FAB corpus is scheduled to be made freely available by the end of 2020.
Call My Net 2: A New Resource for Speaker Recognition (2020)

We introduce the Call My Net 2 (CMN2) Corpus, a new resource for speaker recognition featuring Tunisian Arabic conversations between friends and family, incorporating both traditional telephony and VoIP data. The corpus contains data from over 400 Tunisian Arabic speakers collected via a custom-built platform deployed in Tunis, with each speaker making 10 or more calls each lasting up to 10 minutes. Calls include speech in various realistic and natural acoustic settings, both noisy and non-noisy. Speakers used a variety of handsets, including landline and mobile devices, and made VoIP calls from tablets or computers. All calls were subject to a series of manual and automatic quality checks, including speech duration, audio quality, language identity and speaker identity. The CMN2 corpus has been used in two NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluations (SRE18 and SRE19), and the SRE test sets as well as the full CMN2 corpus will be published in the Linguistic Data Consortium Catalog. We describe CMN2 corpus requirements, the telephone collection platform, and procedures for call collection. We review properties of the CMN2 dataset and discuss features of the corpus that distinguish it from prior SRE collection efforts, including some of the technical challenges encountered with collecting VoIP data.
DaCToR: A Data Collection Tool for the RELATER Project (2020)

Collecting domain-specific data for under-resourced languages, e.g., dialects of languages, can be very expensive, potentially financially prohibitive and taking long time. Moreover, in the case of rarely written languages, the normalization of non-canonical transcription might be another time consuming but necessary task. In order to collect domain-specific data in such circumstances in a time and cost-efficient way, collecting read data of pre-prepared texts is often a viable option. In order to collect data in the domain of psychiatric diagnosis in Arabic dialects for the project RELATER, we have prepared the data collection tool DaCToR for collecting read texts by speakers in the respective countries and districts in which the dialects are spoken. In this paper we describe our tool, its purpose within the project RELATER and the dialects which we have started to collect with the tool.
Development and Evaluation of Speech Synthesis Corpora for Latvian (2020)

Text to speech (TTS) systems are necessary for all languages to ensure accessibility and availability of digital language services. Recent advances in neural speech synthesis have eText to speech (TTS) systems are necessary for any language to ensure accessibility and availability of digital language services. Recent advances in neural speech synthesis have enabled the development of such systems with a data-driven approach that does not require significant development of language-specific tools. However, smaller languages often lack speech corpora that would be sufficient for training current neural TTS models, which require at least 30 hours of good quality audio recordings from a single speaker in a noiseless environment with matching transcriptions. Making such a corpus manually can be cost prohibitive. This paper presents an unsupervised approach to obtain a suitable corpus from unannotated recordings using automated speech recognition for transcription, as well as automated speaker segmentation and identification. The proposed method and software tools are applied and evaluated on a case study for developing a corpus suitable for Latvian speech synthesis based on Latvian public radio archive data.nabled the development of such systems with a data-driven approach that does not require much language-specific tool development. However, smaller languages often lack speech corpora that would be sufficient for training current neural TTS models, which require approximately 30 hours of good quality audio recordings from a single speaker in a noiseless environment with matching transcriptions. Making such a corpus manually can be cost prohibitive. This paper presents an unsupervised approach to obtain a suitable corpus from unannotated recordings using automated speech recognition for transcription, as well as automated speaker segmentation and identification. The proposed methods and software tools are applied and evaluated on a case study for developing a corpus suitable for Latvian speech synthesis based on Latvian public radio archive data.
Abstractive Document Summarization without Parallel Data (2020)

Abstractive summarization typically relies on large collections of paired articles and summaries. However, in many cases, parallel data is scarce and costly to obtain. We develop an abstractive summarization system that relies only on large collections of example summaries and non-matching articles. Our approach consists of an unsupervised sentence extractor that selects salient sentences to include in the final summary, as well as a sentence abstractor that is trained on pseudo-parallel and synthetic data, that paraphrases each of the extracted sentences. We perform an extensive evaluation of our method: on the CNN/DailyMail benchmark, on which we compare our approach to fully supervised baselines, as well as on the novel task of automatically generating a press release from a scientific journal article, which is well suited for our system. We show promising performance on both tasks, without relying on any article-summary pairs.
GameWikiSum: a Novel Large Multi-Document Summarization Dataset (2020)

Today`s research progress in the field of multi-document summarization is obstructed by the small number of available datasets. Since the acquisition of reference summaries is costly, existing datasets contain only hundreds of samples at most, resulting in heavy reliance on hand-crafted features or necessitating additional, manually annotated data. The lack of large corpora therefore hinders the development of sophisticated models. Additionally, most publicly available multi-document summarization corpora are in the news domain, and no analogous dataset exists in the video game domain. In this paper, we propose GameWikiSum, a new domain-specific dataset for multi-document summarization, which is one hundred times larger than commonly used datasets, and in another domain than news. Input documents consist of long professional video game reviews as well as references of their gameplay sections in Wikipedia pages. We analyze the proposed dataset and show that both abstractive and extractive models can be trained on it. We release GameWikiSum for further research: \url{https://github.com/Diego999/GameWikiSum}.
Summarization Corpora of Wikipedia Articles (2020)

In this paper we propose a process to extract summarization corpora from Wikipedia articles. Applied to the German language we create a corpus of 240,000 texts. We use ROUGE scores for the extraction and evaluation of our corpus. For this we provide a ROUGE metric implementation adapted to the German language. The extracted corpus is used to train three abstractive summarization models which we compare to different baselines. The resulting summaries sound natural and cover the input text very well. The corpus can be downloaded at \url{https://github.com/domfr/GeWiki}.
Language Agnostic Automatic Summarization Evaluation (2020)

So far work on automatic summarization has dealt primarily with English data. Accordingly, evaluation methods were primarily developed with this language in mind. In our work, we present experiments of adapting available evaluation methods such as ROUGE and PYRAMID to non-English data. We base our experiments on various English and non-English homogeneous benchmark data sets as well as a non-English heterogeneous data set. Our results indicate that ROUGE can indeed be adapted to non-English data {--} both homogeneous and heterogeneous. Using a recent implementation of performing an automatic PYRAMID evaluation, we also show its adaptability to non-English data.
Two Huge Title and Keyword Generation Corpora of Research Articles (2020)

Recent developments in sequence-to-sequence learning with neural networks have considerably improved the quality of automatically generated text summaries and document keywords, stipulating the need for even bigger training corpora. Metadata of research articles are usually easy to find online and can be used to perform research on various tasks. In this paper, we introduce two huge datasets for text summarization (OAGSX) and keyword generation (OAGKX) research, containing 34 million and 23 million records, respectively. The data were retrieved from the Open Academic Graph which is a network of research profiles and publications. We carefully processed each record and also tried several extractive and abstractive methods of both tasks to create performance baselines for other researchers. We further illustrate the performance of those methods previewing their outputs. In the near future, we would like to apply topic modeling on the two sets to derive subsets of research articles from more specific disciplines.