Publicaties
Speaker-specific Pronunciation for Speech Synthesis Vrije Universiteit Brussel
A pronunciation lexicon for speech synthesis is a key component of a modern speech synthesizer, containing the orthography and phonemic transcriptions of a large number of words. A lexicon may contain words with multiple pronunciations, such as reduced and full versions of (function) words, homographs, or other types of words with multiple acceptable pronunciations such as foreign words or names. Pronunciation variants should therefore be taken ...
Finding structure in a maze of words: Priming as a guide through the mental lexicon KU Leuven
It is a well-known finding that the presentation of a related word (e.g., cat) enhances processing of a subsequently presented target (e.g., dog) compared to when the preceding word is unrelated (e.g., car). This phenomenon, called semantic priming, has been studied extensively because it is thought to provide insight into the principles by which the mental lexicon is organized. However, several crucial issues remain unresolved and/or hotly ...
UrgentiAS : urgentielexicon artsenstage : Lexicon for medical students in clinical placements KU Leuven
The UrgentiAS project (abbreviation of Urgentielexicon ArtsenStage, lexical database for medical students in clinical placements) was set up to meet the needs of Dutch-speaking Belgian medical students attending classes of medical Spanish/French/English to prepare for their clinical placements in obstetrics and gynaecology, pediatrics and internal medicine in hospitals abroad. The project provides students with an easy-to-use multilingual ...
Deriving affective meaning from connectivity in the mental lexicon KU Leuven
The mental lexicon, the structure reflecting a person’s knowledge of words, contains not only information about a word’s denotation, pronunciation, and part of speech, but also about the word’s connotation or affective meaning. While there has been considerable research on the mental lexicon, most has focused on denotational and linguistic aspects of words; connotation has not received as much attention. In this dissertation, we will examine the ...
Optimizing the recognition lexicon for automatic speech recognition Universiteit Gent
Pronunciation-based ASR for names Universiteit Gent
Speech recognition web services for Dutch KU Leuven Universiteit Gent
In this paper we present 3 applications in the domain of Automatic Speech Recognition for Dutch, all of which are developed using our in-house speech recognition toolkit SPRAAK. The speech-to-text transcriber is a large vocabulary continuous speech recognizer, optimized for Southern Dutch. It is capable to select components and adjust parameters on the fly, based on the observed conditions in the audio and was recently extended with the ...
The ESAT 2008 system for N-Best Dutch speech recognition benchmark KU Leuven
This paper describes the ESAT 2008 Broadcast News transcription system for the N-Best 2008 benchmark, developed in part for testing the recent SPRAAK Speech Recognition Toolkit. ESAT system was developed for the Southern Dutch Broadcast News subtask of N-Best using standard methods of modern speech recognition. A combination of improvements were made in commonly overlooked areas such as text normalization, pronunciation modeling, lexicon ...
Asymmetric forms of linguistic adaptation in interactions between Flemish and Dutch speakers Universiteit Antwerpen
Conversation partners tend to copy elements of each other’s utterances during a spoken interaction. This article investigates possible asymmetries in this adaptive process. We study game-based dialogues between Flemish and Dutch speakers, who officially speak the same language, but who can differ in their default use of words and in their pronunciation. Our general hypothesis, mainly based on previous studies that focused on long-term forms of ...