Recent Activities of Speech Corpora and Assessment in Korea

1. Recent Activities of Speech Corpora and Assessment in Korea 2000. 10. 16 Yong-Ju Lee Wonkwang University Korea

2. Recent trend of speech technology commercial market in Korea • New establishment of the venture company rapidly increased in recent years • Not only for original speech technology solution company • but value added speech application system or service company • CTI, UMS, VoIP, • Voice portal, GPS, • Mobile phone • Toy companies, ...

3. It’s because • Government’s venture business promotion policy • Speech technology as an attractive item for new technology business • Many researchers and engineers spin off government supported research institutes and big companies • ETRI, LG, SAMSUNG, … • Many labs in University also participated in the business work • Some major international(multinational) corporations also participated in Korean speech technology market • This also influenced to promote the market

4. Common requirement of speech technology companies • Common use of language resources • Objective methodology for speech I/O assessment • They all deeply interested in establishment of proper organization to handling above problem

5. Spoken Language Resources and Assessment Center(SLRAC) • Role • Systematic construction and distribution of Korean language resources • Speech only at the initial stage • Active role to preparing speech I/O assessment methodologies • Technical information center for speech technology • Status • SLRAC will be set up at first at Speech And Language Science Laboratory(SALL) in Wonkwang University • And will start their job from late this year

6. Distribution items • First stage • Results of speech related project funded by government • Common construction results of educational-industrial consortium • Next state • Private results of each organization(industries, Universities & etc) • Long term construction and administration program supported by government

7. Distribution Policy, ... • Distribution policy • Released to domestic organizations at first • will expand international use with a little time lag • Others • Hope to keep contact and connection with LDC, ELRA • Details will be presented soon!!

8. Brief introduction of speech and language corpora and assessment related projects • Construction of speech and language corpora and assessment methodologies(2000 ~ 2001, 2 years) • Supported by Ministry of Science and Technology • Goal • Language part (accomplished by KAIST) • methodology design of machine translation system performance evaluation • methodology design of information retrieved system performance evaluation • Speech part(accomplished by Wonkwang Univ.) • construction of 2000 speaker’s telephone speech corpus • isolated and connected digit, Phonetically Rich Words • set up and modification of K-ToBI transcription system and prototyping of prosody DB • Design and construction of speech and language corpus for Korean dictation system

9. Continued • Results(speech corpora) will be distributed at the SLRAC • Details will be presented in next meeting

10. Continued • Research on the basic platform of dialog system(Late 2001 ~ 2003, 3 years) • Supported by Ministry of Commerce, Industry of Energy • Accomplished by Seogang Univ. & Wonkwang Univ. • Various kinds of dialog speech corpora will be produced • various tasks and environments

11. Continued • Automatic captioning the TV program using speech recognition(2000 ~ 2001) • Supported by Ministry of Information and Communication • Accomplished by ETRI • Broadcast news speech corpus will be produced

12. Continued • Speech interface for internet application(2000 ~ 2002) • Supported by Ministry of Information and Communication • Accomplished by Korea Telecom • Various speech corpora is now preparing • words, phrase and sentence speech corpora for web application

13. Continued • Brain science research(1998 ~ 2007) • Supported by Ministry of Science and Technology • Accomplished by KAIST • Some speech corpus will be designed for language perceptual study

14. Continued • Other private industries • Industries and other organizations are preparing(or already prepared) various speech corpora • telephone speech(wire and mobile) • various kind of speech corpora under PC environment • command words for Car environment(voice dialing, GPS, etc.) • etc.

15. New trial for speech corpora in Korean • Several industries share expense for corpora construction • Experienced group produce it • SLRAC host the project and selling the results • Give a benefit for first attendants

16. First trial • Korean DIGIT speech corpus • Difficult but essential item for Korean speech recognition • Korean digit = monosyllable • First stage : 500 speaker • Contents • isolated words, connected 4 digit strings • various length digit string • telephone number, ID number, date and time, credit card number, etc. • Various kind of collecting environment • Will be released early next year • Next candidate • names, geographical name, etc.

17. Korean COCOSDA • Consult about • Establishment of speech and language resource distribution center(SLRAC etc.) • Planning for speech related national project • Sponsor • The technical meeting for speech I/O assessment and speech corpora under the auspices of academic society • Korean Science Foundation(KOSEF) start to support with Special Interest Group promotion program(2000 ~ 2004) • “SIG for speech I/O assessment and speech corpora” • This will help more active activities

18. Oriental COCOSDA 2001 • Host • The 2001 Oriental COCOSDA workshop in Korea (24 Aug. 2001)