Table Of ContentEditors
Dafydd Gibbon · Roger Moore · Richard Winski
Handbook of Standards and Resources
for Spoken Language Systems
The authoring, collation and editing of the texts contained in both
the paper and electronic versions of this volume were supported by
the Commission of the European Communities, Directorate General
XIII ( Language Engineering) in the project LRE-61-100 "Expert
Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards", Spoken
Language Working Group (EAGLES/ SLWG).
Handbook of Standards
and Resources for
Spoken Language Systems
edited by
Dafydd Gibbon
Roger Moore
Richard Winski
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York 1997
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.
@) Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines
of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Handbook of standards and resources for spoken language
systems I edited by Dafydd Gibbon, Roger Moore, Richard
Winski.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3-11-015366-1 (cloth/CD ROM; alk. paper)
I. Natural language processing (Computer science) I. Gib-
bon, Dafydd. II. Moore, Roger, 1952- III. Winski,
Richard, 1957 -
QA76.9.N38H365 1997
006.4'54-dc21 97-22921
CIP
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Handbook of standards and resources for spoken language
systems I ed. by Dafydd Gibbon . . . - Berlin ; New York :
Mouton de Gruyter
ISBN 3-11-015366-1
DBN: 95.062440.3
SG: 51;28
© Copyright 1997 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mecha
nical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Typesetting with If.TEX: Inge Mertins, Bielefeld.
Printing: Ratzlow-Druck, Berlin.
Binding: Liideritz & Bauer, Berlin.
Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin.
Printed in Germany.
Editorial preface
The technical production of this handbook has been a joint effort by several
groups involving a large number of people, and the success of the coordi
nation process in itself is by no means the least significant result of the
EAGLES Spoken Language Working Group (see Chapter 1), with partic
ular credit to the fellow-members of the editorial team, Roger Moore and
Richard Winski, for an inspiring and supportive style of collaboration.
The first group comprises the technical authors. All of them deserve thanks
for their patience and cooperativeness, despite over-full schedules, heavy
responsibilities and, in many cases, also the need to learn :0-'lE}C in the
process.
The second group includes the EAGLES support team, particularly the
organisers in Pisa, Antonio Zampolli and Nicoletta Calzolari, with their
untiring efforts to coordinate a somewhat unruly band of experts. Jock
McNaught brought his editorial expertise in electronic publishing to bear
on the initial layout design, and on solutions for a multitude of thorny
problems.
The third group includes my team in Bielefeld, especially Inge Mertins, who
put in a massive amount of work researching sources, re-formatting from a
variety of source formats, taking care of complex style packages and spend
ing month after month gently and effectively coaxing various authors to
provide readable text, graphics and formulae. Thorsten Bamberg brought
his expert knowledge of UNIX systems programming to bear on many tech
nical problems; having found that available software did not scale up to
handle a document of the size and complexity of this handbook, he specified
and implemented a :0-'lE}C to HTML conversion strategy which did work,
and shared his results with the latex2html software developers, resulting
in better software. Holger Ulrich Nord and Thorsten Trippel re-formatted
the revised version in HTML, battling with many new format styles.
The fourth group is the publishing team led by Anke Beck at Mouton de
Gruyter, whose professional standards forced us all to re-think many aspects
of presentation and formatting, and on whose advice we were able to rely in
designing a :0-'lE}C document class to emulate the Mouton de Gruyter house
style (though a couple of our own oddities remain).
The fifth group comprises those responsible at Directorate General XIII of
the European Commission, Norbert Brinkhoff-Button, the project officer,
and Roberto Cencioni, who deserve acknowledgment for their foresight, their
willingness to be persuaded to take risks with this novel publishing venture
for the field of spoken language technology, and above all for their patience
in what must have seemed like an unending production story.
The main aim during the technical production process was to produce a
high-quality handbook which on the one hand documents the core of stan-
vi Editorial preface
dard good practice during the 1990s, and on the other hand presents a
solid platform for further development. To attain this goal, a number of
textual smoothing processes were required. The format conversion and for
matting tasks have already been mentioned; English style and idiom in
several chapters, by both native and non-native speakers, had to be consid
erably adapted for general readability and consistency. Many overlaps were
removed, many additional details incorporated, cross-references to other
chapters and the other EAGLES Working Groups were included, copyrights
(for instance for electronic IPA versions) were negotiated, and additional
appendix materials were elicited. Some of the appendices were specially
written for the handbook, but most were generously provided by other Eu
ropean Commission funded projects, notably the SAM project, and were
left unchanged apart from the necessary re-formatting. In certain areas, for
instance, with corpus copyrights and with clandestine recording, legal and
ethical issues arose, which could only be touched on in passing.
Recommendations are given explicitly in subsections in each chapter, and
can thus be conveniently referred to by consulting the table of contents,
which is deliberately kept rather detailed and is thus unusually long. The
task of completely 'homogenising' the style of recommendations proved to
be too comprehensive at the present stage, however, partly because of the
variety of recommendation types, and partly because of the different pre
sentation styles of authors from different disciplines.
Since the original conception of the report four years before publication, the
importance of the World Wide Web for research has expanded enormously.
This has made the publication of sources for corpora and tools unnecessary:
Web search engines can quickly find the up-to-date addresses. The second
consideration which emerged shortly before the final production phase was
the possibility of publication on the Web. The pros and cons of this were
much debated, and criteria of overall portability, durability, robustness and
convenience of paper versions (with library and paperback editions) scored
over a purely electronic hypertext mode; in addition, the publisher is pro
viding CD-ROM and, courageously, Web versions.
Despite all efforts, the handbook has a number of obvious shortcomings,
and readers will no doubt collect their own selection of these. For the short
comings I beg the readers' indulgence, and urge them to communicate their
suggestions and thereby help to improve future versions of the handbook.
Dafydd Gibbon
(Technical Editor)
Main technical authors
User's guide Roger Moore
Part I:
System design Khalid Choukri
SL corpus design Els den Os
SL corpus collection Christoph Draxler
SL corpus representation Els den Os
Part II:
SL lexica Dafydd Gibbon
Language models Hermann Ney
Pysical characterisation and Lars Knohl & Volker Kraft
description
Part III:
Assessment methodologies and Peter Howell
experimental design
Assessment of recognition systems David van Leeuwen & H. Steeneken
Assessment of speaker verification Frederic Bimbot &
systems Gerard Chollet
Assessment of synthesis systems Renee van Bezooijen &
Vincent van Reuven
Assessment of interactive systems Norman Fraser
Part IV:
Contributions from named Projects
Main new contributions Christoph Draxler, John Esling,
and revisions John Wells
Contents
1 User's guide I
1. 1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.1 EAGLES objectives . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.2 EAGLES organisational structure 2
1.1.3 EAGLES workplan . . . . . . . . 3
1.2 Spoken Language systems, standards and resources . 4
1.2.1 Spoken Language systems . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2.2 Standards and resources for Spoken Language systems 5
1.3 The EAGLES Spoken Language Working Group (WG5) . . . . 9
1.3.1 Subgroups of the EAGLES Spoken Language Working
Group ........................... 11
1.3.2 Relationships with the other EAGLES Working Groups 11
1.3.3 Workshops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3.4 Production of the handbook . . . . . . . . 13
1.3.5 Consultation with the R&D Community . 13
1.4 Overview of the handbook . 14
1.4.1 Intended readership . . . . . . . . . 14
1.4.2 Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.4.3 The main chapters of the handbook 21
1.5 The current state of play . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1.6 Possible future actions . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1.6.1 Revision and completion of existing documentation . 25
1.6.2 Extended survey of existing practice 25
1.6.3 Extension of language base . . . . . . . 26
1.6.4 Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
1.6.5 Move to prescriptive recommendations . 26
1.6.6 Publication and dissemination 26
1.6. 7 Coordination with other bodies 26
1. 7 Contact points . . 27
1.8 Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Part I: Spoken language system and corpus design 29
2 System design 30
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.1.1 System capability profile versus application require-
ment profile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.1.2 Technical features versus system capabilities. . . 33
2.1.3 System in operation versus laboratory prototype 34
