Odile Mella


2017

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An enhanced automatic speech recognition system for Arabic
Mohamed Amine Menacer | Odile Mella | Dominique Fohr | Denis Jouvet | David Langlois | Kamel Smaili
Proceedings of the Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

Automatic speech recognition for Arabic is a very challenging task. Despite all the classical techniques for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which can be efficiently applied to Arabic speech recognition, it is essential to take into consideration the language specificities to improve the system performance. In this article, we focus on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) speech recognition. We introduce the challenges related to Arabic language, namely the complex morphology nature of the language and the absence of the short vowels in written text, which leads to several potential vowelization for each graphemes, which is often conflicting. We develop an ASR system for MSA by using Kaldi toolkit. Several acoustic and language models are trained. We obtain a Word Error Rate (WER) of 14.42 for the baseline system and 12.2 relative improvement by rescoring the lattice and by rewriting the output with the right Z hamoza above or below Alif.

2016

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The IFCASL Corpus of French and German Non-native and Native Read Speech
Juergen Trouvain | Anne Bonneau | Vincent Colotte | Camille Fauth | Dominique Fohr | Denis Jouvet | Jeanin Jügler | Yves Laprie | Odile Mella | Bernd Möbius | Frank Zimmerer
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

The IFCASL corpus is a French-German bilingual phonetic learner corpus designed, recorded and annotated in a project on individualized feedback in computer-assisted spoken language learning. The motivation for setting up this corpus was that there is no phonetically annotated and segmented corpus for this language pair of comparable of size and coverage. In contrast to most learner corpora, the IFCASL corpus incorporate data for a language pair in both directions, i.e. in our case French learners of German, and German learners of French. In addition, the corpus is complemented by two sub-corpora of native speech by the same speakers. The corpus provides spoken data by about 100 speakers with comparable productions, annotated and segmented on the word and the phone level, with more than 50% manually corrected data. The paper reports on inter-annotator agreement and the optimization of the acoustic models for forced speech-text alignment in exercises for computer-assisted pronunciation training. Example studies based on the corpus data with a phonetic focus include topics such as the realization of /h/ and glottal stop, final devoicing of obstruents, vowel quantity and quality, pitch range, and tempo.

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Weakly-supervised text-to-speech alignment confidence measure
Guillaume Serrière | Christophe Cerisara | Dominique Fohr | Odile Mella
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

This work proposes a new confidence measure for evaluating text-to-speech alignment systems outputs, which is a key component for many applications, such as semi-automatic corpus anonymization, lips syncing, film dubbing, corpus preparation for speech synthesis and speech recognition acoustic models training. This confidence measure exploits deep neural networks that are trained on large corpora without direct supervision. It is evaluated on an open-source spontaneous speech corpus and outperforms a confidence score derived from a state-of-the-art text-to-speech aligner. We further show that this confidence measure can be used to fine-tune the output of this aligner and improve the quality of the resulting alignment.

2015

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Qualitative investigation of the display of speech recognition results for communication with deaf people
Agnès Piquard-Kipffer | Odile Mella | Jérémy Miranda | Denis Jouvet | Luiza Orosanu
Proceedings of SLPAT 2015: 6th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies

2014

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Designing a Bilingual Speech Corpus for French and German Language Learners: a Two-Step Process
Camille Fauth | Anne Bonneau | Frank Zimmerer | Juergen Trouvain | Bistra Andreeva | Vincent Colotte | Dominique Fohr | Denis Jouvet | Jeanin Jügler | Yves Laprie | Odile Mella | Bernd Möbius
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

We present the design of a corpus of native and non-native speech for the language pair French-German, with a special emphasis on phonetic and prosodic aspects. To our knowledge there is no suitable corpus, in terms of size and coverage, currently available for the target language pair. To select the target L1-L2 interference phenomena we prepare a small preliminary corpus (corpus1), which is analyzed for coverage and cross-checked jointly by French and German experts. Based on this analysis, target phenomena on the phonetic and phonological level are selected on the basis of the expected degree of deviation from the native performance and the frequency of occurrence. 14 speakers performed both L2 (either French or German) and L1 material (either German or French). This allowed us to test, recordings duration, recordings material, the performance of our automatic aligner software. Then, we built corpus2 taking into account what we learned about corpus1. The aims are the same but we adapted speech material to avoid too long recording sessions. 100 speakers will be recorded. The corpus (corpus1 and corpus2) will be prepared as a searchable database, available for the scientific community after completion of the project.

2012

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Gestion d’erreurs pour la fiabilisation des retours automatiques en apprentissage de la prosodie d’une langue seconde [Handling of errors for increasing automatic feedback reliability in foreign language prosody learning]
Anne Bonneau | Dominique Fohr | Irina Illina | Denis Jouvet | Odile Mella | Larbi Mesbahi | Luiza Orosanu
Traitement Automatique des Langues, Volume 53, Numéro 3 : Du bruit dans le signal : gestion des erreurs en traitement automatique des langues [Managing noise in the signal: Error handling in natural language processing]

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CoALT: A Software for Comparing Automatic Labelling Tools
Dominique Fohr | Odile Mella
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

Speech-text alignment tools are frequently used in speech technology and research. In this paper, we propose a GPL software CoALT (Comparing Automatic Labelling Tools) for comparing two automatic labellers or two speech-text alignment tools, ranking them and displaying statistics about their differences. The main feature of CoALT is that a user can define its own criteria for evaluating and comparing the speech-text alignment tools since the required quality for labelling depends on the targeted application. Beyond ranking, our tool provides useful statistics for each labeller and above all about their differences and can emphasize the drawbacks and advantages of each labeller. We have applied our software for the French and English languages but it can be used for another language by simply defining the list of the phonetic symbols and optionally a set of phonetic rules. In this paper we present the usage of the software for comparing two automatic labellers on the corpus TIMIT. Moreover, as automatic labelling tools are configurable (number of GMMs, phonetic lexicon, acoustic parameterisation), we then present how CoALT allows to determine the best parameters for our automatic labelling tool.

2004

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Development of New Telephone Speech Databases for French: the NEOLOGOS Project
Elisabeth Pinto | Delphine Charlet | Hélène François | Djamel Mostefa | Olivier Boëffard | Dominique Fohr | Odile Mella | Frédéric Bimbot | Khalid Choukri | Yann Philip | Francis Charpentier
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04)