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Ron Cole: Speech Systems and Speech Tools from OGI-CSLU



Dear List -

Ron Cole of the Center for Spoken Language Understanding at the Oregon
Graduate Institute sent me the attached announcements of some summer
courses they are running, and the software toolkit they are making
available.

  DAn.

------- Forwarded Message
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 97 21:55 PDT
From: cole@cse.ogi.edu (Ron Cole)
Subject: Short Courses and Speech Tools

Dear Colleague,

I believe the following short courses and software tools will
be of interest to you.

Ron Cole, Director
Center for Spoken Language Understanding
Oregon Graduate Institute

____________________________________________________________________

                 Spoken Language Systems Short Courses

                            Summer of '97

                     http://www.cse.ogi.edu/CSLU

The Center for Spoken Language Understanding is offering four
different laboratory short courses this summer on research and
development of spoken language systems.  Each course provide hands-on
experience using the CSLU Toolkit, a comprehensive set of software
tools and technologies for research and development of spoken language
systems.

The courses are offered on the campus of the Oregon Graduate Institute
of Science and Technology near Portland, Oregon, a short drive from
the Oregon coast, the Columbia River Gorge and the Cascade Mountains
(which offer summer skiing).  A brief description of each course is
given below.  Detailed course descriptions, course dates and
information on how to register are available on the CSLU Web site
(http://www.cse.ogi.edu/CSLU).  Attendance is limited by the number of
machines in our new computer teaching laboratory (donated by Intel),
so register soon to hold a spot.

Building Spoken Dialogue Systems.  This course teaches the principles
  of dialogue design and system development needed to build spoken
  dialogue systems for a variety of real-world applications.  Through a
  series of exercises, students build spoken dialogue systems of
  increasing complexity, while learning the fundamentals skills needed
  to build complex systems.  Students demonstrate these skills during a
  final project, in which they design and demonstrate their own system.
  (Course materials and students' project descriptions from previous
  courses are available on the CSLU Web site.)

Modern Methods in Text-to-Speech Synthesis.  This course, taught by
  Alan Black and Paul Taylor from the University of Edinburgh and Mike
  Macon from OGI, uses the Festival TTS system to teach students the
  principles of TTS, and how to manipulate Festival's system modules to
  produce natural sounding speech.

Language Resources.  Research and development of spoken language
  systems depends critically on the collection and annotation of
  language resources.  Students will learn to design speech corpora to
  meet the needs of research projects and practical applications, and
  gain experience in each of the stages of data collection and
  annotation.  Students will conceptualize, design, collect, annotate
  and document a speech database for their project.

Advanced Toolkit Course.  This course is intended for researchers and
  application developers who desire a deeper understanding of the
  Toolkit architecture and underlying technologies. Participants will
  learn to manipulate the toolkit to add new features or modify existing
  ones.  The first part of the course covers the software architecture
  of the toolkit (e.g. how IO works, how to add network services).  The
  second part covers the speech recognition and dialogue technologies
  used in the toolkit.

____________________________________________________________________

CSLU Toolkit Now Available

The Center for Spoken Language Understanding at the Oregon Graduate
Institute invites students, researchers and anyone else
interested in spoken language technology to use the CSLU
Toolkit, software tools and technologies supporting research
and development of spoken language systems and human language
technologies.

The toolkit is designed to support a wide range of research
and educational activities.  In particular, it includes:

* Tools for building and using neural network and HMM speech
  recognizers for small and medium vocabularies, including pre-built
  neural network recognizers for digits, alphabet and general English.
  (Work is underway on large vocabulary continuous speech recognition and
  these tools and recognizers will be included when ready.)

* The Festival TTS system, built at the University of Edinburgh.
  Festival is a working  text-to-speech system and comprehensive
  environment for research and development of concatenative TTS systems.
  At present, Festival speaks with a Sottish accent; over time, more
  voices will be added, the quality of speech will be improved, and it will
  be better integrated with the rest of the toolkit.

* Easy-to-use graphical design tools which allow the user to build and
  run spoken dialogue systems over the telephone.

* A variety of speech processing and visualization tools.

* A software infrastructure based on dynamically loading packages into
  Tcl.  There is powerful support built in for distributed computing
  (e.g. all live mic and phone IO uses network servers).

The toolkit can be downloaded and used without charge for
non-commercial purposes.  Complete sources are included.  Feedback and
contributions are encouraged.

The software should compile on most UNIX platforms (sometimes it takes
a bit of effort, but we are working on that).  Binary distributions
are available for Solaris/SPARC, Solaris/i86, and Digital Unix/Alpha.
This summer it will be available for Windows NT/95.  For live speech
input and output, we support soundblaster and Dialogic cards for
Solaris/i86 and Sun audio.  We hope to add support for voice modems in
the future.

For more information, see http://www.cse.ogi.edu/CSLU


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