Table Of ContentEAGLES SLWG Handbook
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EAGLES
Expert Advisory Groups
on Language Engineering Standards
Spoken Language Working Group
EC-DGXIII, LRE
LRE-61-100
HANDBOOK
of
Standards and Resources for Spoken Language
Systems
Edited by
Dafydd Gibbon, Roger Moore, Richard Winski
Published by Mouton de Gruyter, 1997
Walter de Gruyter Publishers, Berlin & New York
Preliminaries
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Full contents
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List of Figures
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EAGLES SLWG Handbook
List of Tables
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User's guide
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Part I: Spoken language system and corpus design
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Part II: Spoken language characterisation
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Part III: Spoken language system assessment
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References (151 kB)
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Part IV: Spoken language reference materials
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Glossary
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List of abbreviations
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Alphabetically partitioned index
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Full index (655 kB)
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Preliminaries
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Preliminaries
Editorial preface
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Main technical authors
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Editorial preface
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Editorial preface
The technical production of this handbook has been a joint effort by several groups involving a large
number of people, and the success of the coordination process in itself is by no means the least
significant result of the EAGLES Spoken Language Working Group (see Chapter `User's Guide'), with
particular credit to the fellow-members of the editorial team, Roger Moore and Richard Winski, for an
inspiring and supportive style of collaboration.
The first group comprises the technical authors. All of them deserve thanks for their patience and
cooperativeness, despite over-full schedules, heavy responsibilities and, in many cases, also the need to
learn LaTeX in the process.
The second group includes the EAGLES support team, particularly the organisers in Pisa, Antonio
Zampolli and Nicoletta Calzolari, with their untiring efforts to coordinate a somewhat unruly band of
experts. Jock McNaught brought his editorial expertise in electronic publishing to bear on the initial
layout design, and on solutions for a multitude of thorny problems.
The third group includes my team in Bielefeld, especially Inge Mertins, who put in a massive amount of
work researching sources, re-formatting from a variety of source formats, taking care of complex style
packages and spending month after month gently and effectively coaxing various authors to provide
readable text, graphics and formulae. Thorsten Bomberg brought his expert knowledge of UNIX systems
programming to bear on many technical problems; having found that available software did not scale up
to handle a document of the size and complexity of this handbook, he specified and implemented a
LaTeX to HTML conversion strategy which did work, and shared his results with the latex2html
software developers, resulting in better software. Holger Ulrich Nord and Thorsten Trippel re-formatted
the revised version in HTML, battling with many new format styles.
The fourth group is the publishing team led by Anke Beck at Mouton de Gruyter, whose professional
standards forced us all to re-think many aspects of presentation and formatting, and on whose advice we
were able to rely in designing a LaTeX document class to emulate the Mouton de Gruyter house style
(though a couple of our own oddities remain).
The fifth group comprises those responsible at Directorate General XIII of the European Commission,
Norbert Brinkhoff-Button, the project officer, and Roberto Cencioni, who deserve acknowledgment for
their foresight, their willingness to be persuaded to take risks with this novel publishing venture for the
field of spoken language technology, and above all for their patience in what must have seemed like an
unending production story.
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Editorial preface
The main aim during the technical production process was to produce a high-quality handbook which on
the one hand documents the core of standard good practice during the 1990s, and on the other hand
presents a solid platform for further development. To attain this goal, a number of textual smoothing
processes were required. The format conversion and formatting tasks have already been mentioned;
English style and idiom in several chapters, by both native and non-native speakers, had to be
considerably adapted for general readability and consistency. Many overlaps were removed, many
additional details incorporated, cross-references to other chapters and the other EAGLES Working
Groups were included, copyrights (for instance for electronic IPA versions) were negotiated, and
additional appendix materials were elicited. Some of the appendices were specially written for the
handbook, but most were generously provided by other European Commission funded projects, notably
the SAM project, and were left unchanged apart from the necessary re-formatting. In certain areas, for
instance, with corpus copyrights and with clandestine recording, legal and ethical issues arose, which
could only be touched on in passing.
Recommendations are given explicitly in subsections in each chapter, and can thus be conveniently
referred to by consulting the table of contents, which is deliberately kept rather detailed and is thus
unusually long. The task of completely `homogenising' the style of recommendations proved to be too
comprehensive at the present stage, however, partly because of the variety of recommendation types,
and partly because of the different presentation styles of authors from different disciplines.
Since the original conception of the report four years before publication, the importance of the World
Wide Web for research has expanded enormously. This has made the publication of sources for corpora
and tools unnecessary: Web search engines can quickly find the up-to-date addresses. The second
consideration which emerged shortly before the final production phase was the possibility of publication
on the Web. The pros and cons of this were much debated, and criteria of overall portability, durability,
robustness and convenience of paper versions (with library and paperback editions) scored over a purely
electronic hypertext mode; in addition, the publisher is providing CD-ROM and, courageously, Web
versions.
Despite all efforts, the handbook has a number of obvious shortcomings, and readers will no doubt
collect their own selection of these. For the shortcomings I beg the readers' indulgence, and urge them to
communicate their suggestions and thereby help to improve future versions of the handbook.
Dafydd Gibbon
(Technical Editor)
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Main technical authors
User's guide Roger Moore
Part I:
System design Khalid Choukri
SL corpus design Els den Os
SL corpus collection Christoph Draxler
SL corpus representation Els den Os
Part II:
SL lexica Dafydd Gibbon
Language models Hermann Ney
Pysical characterisation and Lars Knohl & Volker Kraft
description
Part III:
Assessment methodologies and Peter Howell
experimental design
Assessment of recognition David van Leeuwen & H. Steeneken
systems
Assessment of speaker Frédéric Bimbot &
verification
systems Gérard Chollet
Assessment of synthesis systems Renée van Bezooijen &
Vincent van Heuven
Assessment of interactive systems Norman Fraser
Part IV:
Contributions from named
Projects
Main new contributions Christoph Draxler, John Esling,
and revisions John Wells
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Contents
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Contents
Preliminaries
l
Editorial preface
m
Main technical authors
m
List of Figures
l
List of Tables
l
User's guide
l
Background
m
E objectives
n AGLES
E organisational structure
n AGLES
E workplan
n AGLES
Spoken Language systems, standards and resources
m
Spoken Language systems
n
Standards and resources for Spoken Language systems
n
Spoken Language standards and resources in Europe
n
The ESPRIT S project
n AM
Other EU projects
n
The European Language Resources Association
n
Spoken Language standards and resources worldwide
n
COCOSDA
n
The Linguistic Data Consortium
n
The E Spoken Language Working Group (WG5)
m AGLES
Subgroups of the E Spoken Language Working Group
n AGLES
Relationships with the other E Working Groups
n AGLES
Workshops
n
Production of the handbook
n
Consultation with the R&D Community
n
Overview of the handbook
m
Intended readership
n
Scope
n
Spoken Language system design and specification
n
Spoken Language resources
n
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Contents
Assessment of Spoken Language systems
n
The reference material
n
The main chapters of the handbook
n
System design
n
Spoken Language corpus design
n
Spoken Language corpus collection
n
Spoken Language corpus representation
n
Spoken Language lexica
n
Language models
n
Physical characterisation and description
n
Assessment methodologies and experimental design
n
Assessment of recognition systems
n
Assessment of speaker verification systems
n
Assessment of synthesis systems
n
Assessment of interactive systems
n
The current state of play
m
Possible future actions
m
Revision and completion of existing documentation
n
Extended survey of existing practice
n
Extension of language base
n
Terminology
n
Move to prescriptive recommendations
n
Publication and dissemination
n
Coordination with other bodies
n
Contact points
m
Acknowledgements
m
Spoken language system and corpus design
l
System design
m
Introduction
n
System capability profile versus application requirement profile
n
Technical features versus system capabilities
n
System in operation versus laboratory prototype
n
Speech recognition systems
n
Speaker dependency
n
Speaker-adapted systems
n
Speaking aspects
n
Speaking mode
n
Speaking fluency
n
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