Browsing Conference Papers by Author "Barnard, Etienne"
Now showing items 1-16 of 16
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Adapting mobile medical information search to low-resourced areas
(IST-Africa, 2013)Providing good medical care in low-resourced areas is a challenge faced by many low and middle income countries. Continuously improving mobile communication infrastructure in these areas is however providing the opportunity ... -
Correlation between rapid learnability and user preference in IVR systems for developing regions
(iIST-Africa, 2013)Access to information and communication is one of the most important needs in any population group. It is generally challenging for people in the developing world to access information because the tools and the technologies ... -
Cross-bandwidth adaptation for ASR systems
(Pattern recognition association of South Africa (PRASA), 2013)Mismatches between application and training data greatly reduce the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. However, collecting suitable amounts of in-domain and application-specific data for training ... -
A discourse model of affect for text-to-speech synthesis
(Pattern recognition association of South Africa (PRASA), 2013)This paper introduces a model of affect to improve prosody in text-to-speech synthesis. It operates on the discourse level of text to predict the underlying linguistic factors that contribute towards emotional appraisal, ... -
A distributed approach to speech resource collection
(Pattern recognition association of South Africa (PRASA), 2013)We describe the integration of several tools to enable the end-to-end development of an Automatic Speech Recognition system in a typical under-resourced language. Google App Engine is employed as the core environment for ... -
Effects of application type on the choice of interaction modality in IVR systems
(Unisa Press, 2012)This paper addresses the feasibility of using the telephone as a tool for information access in the technology challenged and illiterate communities of Southern Africa. We did two case studies of disparate Interactive Voice ... -
Generating fundamental frequency contours for speech synthesis in Yorùbá
(International Speech Communication Association ( ISCA ), 2013)We present methods for modelling and synthesising fundamental frequency (F0) contours suitable for application in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis of Yorùbá (an African tone language). These methods are discussed and compared ... -
Improved transition models for cepstral trajectories
(Pattern recognition association of South Africa (PRASA), 2012)We improve on a piece-wise linear model of the trajectories of Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, which are commonly used as features in Automatic Speech Recognition. For this purpose, we have created a very clean ... -
Kernel bandwidth estimation for non-parametric density estimation: a comparative study
(Pattern recognition association of South Africa (PRASA), 2013)We investigate the performance of conventional bandwidth estimators for non- parametric kernel density estimation on a number of representative pattern-recognition tasks, to gain a better understanding of the behaviour of ... -
Medium-vocabulary speech recognition for under-resourced languages
(SLTU, 2012)We report on the development of speech-recognition systems that are able to perform accurate recognition on mediumvocabulary tasks (i.e. tasks that require distinctions between approximately 200 different terms). We are ... -
The semi-automated creation of stratified speech corpora
(Pattern recognition association of South Africa (PRASA), 2013)Smartphones provide an efficient means for the collection of speech data; however, the quality of the corpora created in this fashion is not predictable. We describe an approach that allows us to post-process and rank ... -
Spoken language identification system adaptation in under-resourced environments
(Pattern recognition association of South Africa (PRASA), 2013)Speech technologies have matured over the past few decades and have made significant impacts in a variety of fields, from assistive technologies to personal assistants. However, speech system development is a resource ... -
Tone realisation in a Yorùbá speech recognition corpus
(SLTU, 2012)We investigate the acoustic realisation of tone in short continuous utterances in Yorùbá. Fundamental frequency (F0) contours are extracted for automatically aligned syllables from a speech corpus of 33 speakers collected ... -
Towards lecture transcription in resource-scarce environments
(Pattern recognition association of South Africa (PRASA), 2012)We present progress towards automated Lecture Transcription (LT) in resource scarce environments. Our development has focused on the transcription of lectures in Afrikaans from two faculties at North-West University. A ... -
Validating smartphone-collected speech corpora
(SLTU, 2012)We investigate the effectiveness with which the accuracy of a prompted speech corpus can be validated when minimal additional speech resources are available, and specifically when a language model in the target language ... -
A voice service for user feedback on school meals
(ACM, 2012)Research using voice-based services as a technology platform for providing information access and services within developing world regions has shown much promise. The results for design and deployment of such voice-based ...
