Author:Van Heerden, C; Barnard, E; Davel, MDate:Sep 2009Spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) have great potential for information access in the developing world. However, the realisation of that potential requires the solution of several challenging problems, including the development of sufficiently ...Read more
Author:Badenhorst, JAC; Van Heerden, C; Davel, M; Barnard, EDate:Mar 2009The authors describes the Lwazi corpus for automatic speech recognition (ASR), a new telephone speech corpus which includes data from nine Southern Bantu languages. Because of practical constraints, the amount of speech per language is ...Read more
Author:Basson, WD; Davel, MHDate:Nov 2012This paper compares the recognition accuracy of a phoneme-based automatic speech recognition system with that of a grapheme-based system, using Afrikaans as case study. The first system is developed using a conventional pronunciation dictionary, ...Read more
Author:Kleynhans, N; Barnard, EDate:Dec 2013Mismatches between application and training data greatly reduce the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. However, collecting suitable amounts of in-domain and application-specific data for training is resource intensive ...Read more
Author:Molapo, R; Barnard, E; De Wet, FebeDate:Dec 2013The authors describe the integration of several tools to enable the end-to-end development of an Automatic Speech Recognition system in a typical under-resourced language. The authors analyse the data acquired by each of the tools and develop ...Read more
Author:Kleynhans, NT; Barnard, EDate:Oct 2014Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology has matured over the past few decades and has made significant impacts in a variety of fields, from assistive technologies to commercial products. However, ASR system development is a resource ...Read more
Author:Martirosian, O; Davel, MDate:Nov 2007The authors explore pattern recognition techniques for verifying the correctness of a pronunciation lexicon, focusing on techniques that require limited human interaction. They evaluate the British English Example Pronunciation (BEEP) dictionary ...Read more
Author:Govender, Avashna; Nouhou, B; De Wet, FebeDate:Nov 2015Acquiring large amounts of child speech data is a particularly difficult task. One could therefore consider the possibility to add existing corpora of child speech data to the severely limited resources that are available for developing child ...Read more
Author:Feld, M; Barnard, E; Van Heerden, C; Muller, CDate:Dec 2009Multilinguality represents an area of significant opportunities for automatic speech-processing systems: whereas multilingual societies are commonplace, the majority of speechprocessing systems are developed with a single language in mind. ...Read more
Author:Barnard, E; Davel, MH; Van Heerden, C; De Wet, Febe; Badenhorst, JDate:May 2014The NCHLT speech corpus contains wide-band speech from approximately 200 speakers per language, in each of the eleven of cial languages of South Africa. We describe the design and development processes that were undertaken in order to develop ...Read more
Author:De Wet, Febe; Niesler, T; Van der Walt, CDate:Nov 2012Academic literacy proficiency is key to the success of a student at university. Currently, the large-scale assessment of language proficiency, particularly at higher education levels, is dominated by reading and writing tests because listening ...Read more
Author:De Vries, NJ; Davel, MH; Badenhorst, J; Basson, WD; De Wet, Febe; Barnard, E; De Waal, ADate:Jan 2014Acoustic data collection for automatic speech recognition (ASR) purposes is a particularly challenging task when working with under resourced languages, many of which are found in the developing world. We provide a brief overview of related ...Read more
Author:Sahraeian, R; Van Compernolle, D; De Wet, FebeDate:Nov 2015Recently, multilingual deep neural networks (DNNs) have been successfully used to improve under-resourced speech recognizers. Common approaches use either a merged universal phoneme set based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) or a ...Read more