Research and development of speech technology & applications for Mexican Spanish at the Tlatoa group

Abstract

Thanks to the advances in today's technology in terms of processing speed of computers, storage space and the management of sound and video devices, speech technology is a reality in almost any kind of computerized system. Speech applications are being used in personal computers, cellular phones, etc. This makes this interesting technology accessible to almost anyone. Among it's most useful applications we can find telephone-based information services, banking and computer assisted language learning systems. There exist already a large number of commercial products that use speech interfaces, developed mainly for English, German and Japanese. That is why we at TLATOA have focused our efforts on making this technology available in the Spanish spoken in Mexico. To this effect we perform basic research in the different speech processing techniques, trying to improve the performance of speech recognition and synthesis (artificial neural networks, hidden Markov Models (HMM's), Unit Selection, etc.), as well as, the Spanish language, dialogue structure, perception and human-computer interaction approaches, for the development of speech applications.

DIMEx100: A New Phonetic and Speech Corpus for Mexican Spanish

“…Also, the set of phonological rules for all allophones specifies all possible contexts in which these units can occur; the contexts in the right column of Table 2 for all the allophones abstract over all contexts of the form αβγ, where α and γ are the left and right allophones in relation to a reference allophone β. As we have a significant number of instances of all allophones in the corpus, all the contexts specified in the phonological rules appear systematically, and we conclude that the corpus is complete 4 . This is consistent with the perplexity based method used for the corpus design, despite that this computation was performed at the level of the words.…”

Automatic speech recognizers for Mexican Spanish and its open resources

“…In the previous section, one can notice that there are several options available for the Spanish language, but when one focuses in a dialect such as Mexican Spanish, the resources are scarcer. In the literature one can find several articles dedicated to the creation of speech resources for the Mexican Spanish, (Kirschning, 2001;Olguín-Espinoza, Mayorga-Ortiz, Hidalgo-Silva, Vizcarra-Corral, & Mendiola-Cárdenas, 2013;Uraga & Gamboa, 2004). However, researchers usually create small databases to do experiments so one has to contact the authors and depend on their good will to get a copy of the resource (Audhkhasi, Georgiou, & Narayanan, 2011; de Luna Ortega, Mora-González, Martínez-Romo, Luna-Rosas, & Mu Varela, Cuayáhuitl, & Nolazco-Flores, 2003).…”

Creating a Grammar-Based Speech Recognition Parser for Mexican Spanish Using HTK, Compatible with CMU Sphinx-III System

“…and [2]), or the developer groups have been disappeared (for example the TLATOA Group, see [3]), sometimes it is not clear enough if the database is for free use or not because you can not find a link to download it ( [4], [5]), or simply the creators have legal issues with the copyrights so they can not share the database (is the case of [6]), this can only mean that when you read a paper presenting one of these databases you do not count with the physical data to do experiments and understand exactly what are they showing and why.…”