Convolutional Neural Networks have become the standard for image classification tasks, however, these architectures are not invariant to translations of the input image. This lack of invariance is attributed to the use of ...

Although Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely used, their translation invariance (ability to deal with translated inputs) is still subject to some controversy. We explore this question using translation-sensitivity ...

We experiment with a new method to create synthetic models of rare and unseen triphones in order to supplement limited automatic speech recognition (ASR) training data. A trajectory model is used to characterise seen ...

Spoken recordings that have been transcribed for human reading (e.g. as captions for audiovisual material, or to provide alternative modes of access to recordings) are widely available in many languages. Such recordings ...

Personal names are often pronounced in very different ways depending on the language background of the speaker. We seek to determine whether some of these pronunciations 'errors' are systematic and if so, in which ways. ...

Within a multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, knowledge of the language of origin of unknown words can improve pronunciation modelling accuracy. This is of particular importance for ASR systems required ...

The NCHLT speech corpus contains wide-band speech from approximately 200 speakers per language, in each of the eleven official languages of South Africa. We describe the design and development processes that were ...

In this paper, we describe the “Spoken Web Search” Task, which was held as part of the 2011 MediaEval benchmark campaign. The purpose of this task was to perform audio search with audio input in five languages, with very ...

We investigate modeling strategies for English code-switched words as found in a Swahili spoken term detection system. Code switching, where speakers switch language in a conversation, occurs frequently in multilingual ...

In a multilingual society such as South Africa, a practical directory enquiries (DE) application should be able to serve users from various language backgrounds with information relating to names in various languages: ...