Section: Application Domains

Annotation and processing of spoken documents

The first type of annotation consists in transcribing a spoken document in order to get the corresponding sequences of words, with possibly some complementary information, such as the structure (punctuation) or the modality (affirmation/question) of the utterances to make the reading and understanding easier. Typical applications of the automatic transcription of radio or TV shows, or of any other spoken document, include making possible their access by deaf people, as well as by text-based indexing tools.

The second type of annotation is related to speech-text alignment, which aims at determining the starting and ending times of the words, and possibly of the sounds (phonemes). This is of interest in several cases as for example, for annotating speech corpora for linguistic studies, and for synchronizing lip movements with speech sounds, for example for avatar-based communications. Although good results are currently achieved on clean data, automatic speech-text alignment needs to be improved for properly processing noisy spontaneous speech data and needs to be extended to handle overlapping speech.

Finally, there is also a need for speech signal processing techniques in the field of multimedia content creation and rendering. Relevant techniques include speech and music separation, speech equalization, prosody modification, and speaker conversion.