SLTC Newsletter - Summer 2013

The Summer 2013 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee’s Newsletter is now online. It includes a number of announcements from the TC chair, as well as a number of articles collated by the editorial boarded. Subscribe to the newsletter to be automatically notified of the new editions. We believe the newsletter is an ideal forum for updates, reports, announcements and editorials, and encourage interested individuals to send us their contributions.

Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Editor-in-chief
William Campbell, Editor
Haizhou Li, Editor
Patrick Nguyen, Editor

ANNOUNCEMENTS

From the IEEE SLTC chair

Douglas O'Shaughnessy

ARTICLES

The Dialog State Tracking Challenge

Jason D. Williams, Deepak Ramachandran, Alan W. Black, Antoine Raux

In spoken dialog systems, the goal of dialog state tracking is to correctly identify the user's goal from the dialog history, including error-prone speech recognition results. This recent challenge task released 15K real human-computer dialogs and evaluation tools to the research community. Nine teams participated, and results will be published at SigDial.

ALIZE 3.0 - Open-source Platform for Speaker Recognition

Anthony Larcher, Jean-Francois Bonastre and Haizhou Li

ALIZE is a collaborative Open Source toolkit developed for speaker recognition since 2004. The latest release (3.0) includes state-of-the-art methods such as Joint Factor Analysis, i-vector modelling and Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis. The C++ multi-platform implementation of ALIZE is designed to handle the increasing data quantity required for speaker and language detection and facilitate the development of state-of-the-art systems. This article reveals the motivation of the ALIZE open source platform, its architecture, the collaborative community activities, and the functionalities that are available in the 3.0 release.

Interview: Acquiring Corpora using Crowdsourcing

Matthew Marge

Crowdsourcing has become one of the hottest topics in the artificial intelligence community in recent years. Its application to speech and language processing tasks like speech transcription has been very appealing - but what about creating corpora? Can we harness the power of crowdsourcing to improve training data sets for spoken language processing applications like dialogue systems?

The "Search and Hyperlinking" Task at MediaEval

Gareth J. F. Jones, Maria Eskevich, Robin Aly, Roeland Ordelman

This article describes the "Search and Hyperlinking" task at the MediaEval multimedia evaluation benchmark. The Search and Hyperlinking task ran for the first time in 2012 and is running again in 2013. Search and Hyperlinking consists of two sub-tasks: one which focuses on searching content relevant to a user search query from a video archive, and the other on automatic linking to related content from within the same video archive. The 2012 task used a collection of semi-professional user generated video content while the 2013 task is working with a set of TV broadcasts provided by the BBC.

Spoofing and Countermeasures for Speaker Verification: a Need for Standard Corpora, Protocols and Metrics

Nicholas Evans, Junichi Yamagishi and Tomi Kinnunen

Over the last decade biometric person authentication has revolutionised our approach to personal identification and has come to play an essential role in safeguarding personal, national and global security. It is well-known, however, that biometric systems can be "spoofed", i.e. intentionally fooled by impostors. Efforts to develop spoofing countermeasures are under way across the various biometrics communities (http://www.tabularasa-euproject.org/).