30 November: fyi -- phd funding, UK
Index of November 2007 | Index of year: 2007 | Full index
CHARACTERISATION OF REGIONAL ACCENTS OF BRITISH ENGLISH
FOR SPEECH TECHNOLOGY
Professor Martin Russell
Department of Electronic, Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, B15 2TT
UK.
Funding is available for a PhD project in the area of "Characterisation
of Regional
Accents of British English for Speech Technology" in the Department of
Electronic,
Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Birmingham. The
funding is
sufficient to cover EU fees plus maintenance.
If you are interested in this opportunity please contact Professor
Martin Russell
(m.j.russell@bham.ac.uk)
Summary of project
The purpose of this project is to develop new mathematical models which
characterise the
acoustic properties of regional accents of British English and the
relationships between them,
and to investigate the application of these models to accent-robust
speech recognition, accent
identification, and non-native accent detection. The project will use
the existing "Accents of
the British Isles" (ABI-1 and ABI-2) corpora of recordings of read and
spontaneous
conversational speech. It will move on to consider accented telephone
conversational speech
as suitable corpora become available. The project should address the
following issues:
(1) Measurement of human accent identification performance, and the
effect of accent on
human speech recognition of read and spontaneous speech. Subjective
assessment of the
'strengths' of the accents of speakers in the ABI corpora.
(2) Application of conventional language identification techniques to
the problem of accent
identification.
(3) Automatic speech recognition (ASR) experiments to measure the effect
of accent on ASR
performance, and to measure the utility of conventional adaptation
schemes for accent
adaptation.
(4) Development of self-organising topological maps of accent data. The
objective is to
understand relationships between acoustic representations of accent, and
to see how this
correlates with geographical or historical relationships.
(5) Accent ID using topological maps.
(6) Accent adaptation of acoustic models for ASR.
(7) Accent adaptation of pronunciation dictionaries for ASR
(8) Detection of non-native-English accents in the context of general
British English. The
goal is to study how non-native speakers are mapped onto the topological
maps described
above, and in particular to determine whether it is possible to detect
non-native speakers
reliably.
(9) Characterisation of 'compound' accents: Most talkers' speech is not
'single-accent'.
Instead their voice is influenced by a number of different regional
accents. The purpose of
this task is to determine whether it is possible to detect these
compound accents and
decompose them into their component streams
Professor Martin Russell
Department of Electronic, Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of Birmingham
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK
Tel: +44 (0) 121 414 3093
Email: m.j.russell@bham.ac.uk
Index of November 2007 | Index of year: 2007 | Full index