Speech technology for information access: A South African case study

AAAI Spring Symposium - Technical Report

Volumn SS-10-01, Issue , 2010, Pages 8-13

  Barnard, Etienne ^a   Davel, Marelie H ^a   Van Huyssteen, Gerhard B ^a  

^a CSIR MERAKA INSTITUTE   (South Africa)

Author keywords

Resource scarce languages; Spoken language; Technology for development

Indexed keywords

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE; CHARACTER RECOGNITION; DEVELOPING COUNTRIES; INFORMATION RETRIEVAL; USER INTERFACES;

AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION; INFORMATION ACCESS; OFFICIAL LANGUAGES; RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT; SPEECH TECHNOLOGY; SPOKEN LANGUAGES; TEXT-TO-SPEECH SYSTEM; USER INTERFACE DESIGNS;

SPEECH RECOGNITION;

EID: 77957968025     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Conference Proceeding    
DOI: None     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (25)

1. Barnard, E., and Wissing, D. 2008. Vowel variations in Southern Sotho: an acoustical investigation. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 26:255-265.
2. Barnard, E.; Cloete, L.; and Patel, H. 2003. Language and technology literacy barriers to accessing government services. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2739:37-42.
3. Barnard, E.; Davel, M.; and van Heerden, C. 2009. ASR corpus design for resource-scarce languages. In Proceedings of Interspeech, 2847-2850.
4. Barnard, E.; Plauché, M.; and Davel, M. 2008. The utility of spoken dialog systems. In Proceedings of the IEEE Spoken Language Technology workshop, 13-16.
5. Botha, G., and Barnard, E. 2005. Two approaches to gathering text corpora from the world wide web. In Proceedings of PRASA, 194.
6. Carroll, J. M. 1997. Human-computer interaction: Psychology as a science of design. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 46:501-522.
7. Cohen, M.; Giangola, J.; and Balogh, J. 2004. Voice User Interface Design. Addison-Wesley.
8. Davel, M., and Barnard, E. 2008. Pronunciation predication with Default&Refine. Computer Speech and Language 22:374-393.
9. Davel, M., and Martirosian, O. 2009. Pronunciation dictionary development in resource-scarce environments. In Proceedings of Interspeech, 2851-2854.
10. Digium-Inc. 2009. Asterisk: The open source PBX & telephony platform. Online: http://www.asterisk.org.
11. Goronzy, S.; Tomokiyo, L.; Barnard, E.; and Davel, M. 2006. Other challenges: non-native speech, dialects, accents, and local interfaces. In Schultz, T., and Kirchhoff, K., eds., Multilingual speech processing. London: Academic Press. chapter 9, 273-317.
12. Gumede, T., and Plauché, M. 2009. Initial fieldwork for Lwazi a telephone-based spoken dialog system for rural South Africa. In Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2009), 59-65.
13. Lehohla, P. 2003. Census 2001: Census in brief. Statistics South Africa.
14. Meraka-Institute. 2009. The Lwazi project. Online: http://www.meraka.org. za/lwazi.
15. Nasfors, P. 2007. Efficient voice information services for developing countries. Master's thesis, Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University.
16. Plauché, M.; Nallasamy, U.; Pal, J.; Wooters, C.; and Ramachandran, D. 2006. Speech recognition for illiterate access to information and technology. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on ICTD, 83-92.
17. Plauché, M.; de Waal, A.; Sharma, A.; and Gumede, T. 2010. Morphological analysis: A method for selecting ICT applications in South African government service delivery. Information Technologies and International Development (accepted for publication).
18. Sharma, A.; Plauché, M.; Kuun, C.; and Barnard, E. 2009. HIV health information access using spoken dialogue systems: Touchtone vs. speech. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on ICTD, 95-107.
19. Sherwani, J.; Ali, N.; Mirza, S.; Fatma, A.; Memon, Y.; Karim, M.; Tongia, R.; and Rosenfeld, R. 2007. Health-line: Speech-based access to health information by low-literate users. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on ICTD, 131-139.
20. Sherwani, J.; Palijo, S.; Mirza, S.; Ahmed, T.; Ali, N.; and Rosenfeld, R. 2009. Speech vs. touch-tone: Telephony interfaces for information access by low literate users. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on ICTD, 447-457.
21. Tucker, R., and Shalonova, K. 2004. The Local Language Speech Technology Initiative. In Proceedings of the SCALLA Conference.
22. van Heerden, C.; Barnard, E.; and Davel, M. 2009. Basic speech recognition for spoken dialogues. In Proceedings of Interspeech, 3003-3006.
23. van Niekerk, D., and Barnard, E. 2009. Phonetic alignment for speech synthesis in under-resourced languages. In Proceedings of Interspeech, 880-883.
24. Zerbian, S., and Barnard, E. 2008a. Influences on tone in Sepedi, a Southern Bantu language. In Proceedings of Interspeech, 625.
25. Zerbian, S., and Barnard, E. 2008b. Phonetics of intonation in South African Bantu languages. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 26(2):235-254.