The next Idiap Speaker Series will take place at Idiap on June 2nd 2017, room 106

The next Idiap Speaker Series will take place at Idiap on June 2nd 2017, room 106

The Prof. Marelie Davel will give the talk entitled: Multilingual speech recognition in under-resourced environments

Abstract
When speech processing systems are designed for use in multilingual environments, additional complexity is introduced. Identifying when language switching has occurred, predicting how cross-lingual terms will be pronounced, obtaining sufficient speech data from diverse language backgrounds: such factors all complicate the development of practical speech-oriented systems. In this talk, I will discuss our research group's experience in building speech recognition systems for the South African environment, one in which 11 official languages are recognised. I will also show how this relates to our participation in the BABEL project, a recent 5-year international collaborative project aimed at solving the spoken term detection task in under-resourced languages.


Biography
Marelie Davel is a research professor at North-West University, South Africa, and the director of the Multilingual Speech Technologies (MuST) research group. She has a specific interest in multilingual speech technology development in under-resourced environments and the data-driven modelling of human speech and language. She received her BSc degree (Computer Science & Mathematics) from Stellenbosch University, her MSc from University of London, and her PhD (Electronic Engineering, 2005) from the University of Pretoria. She joined the South African CSIR in 1995 as an electronic engineer, later becoming a principal researcher and the research group leader of the Human Language Technologies (HLT) research group at the same institution. In 2002 she spent a year as a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robust Speech group. She joined MuST in 2011 and became the group’s director in 2014. Recent MuST projects include the development of multilingual resources for Google, pronunciation modelling for the BABEL project, and the development of an automatic speech transcription platform for the South African government. She has published approx. 90 papers related to speech and language processing.

The list of previous Iidiap Speaker Series and recording can be found here: Iidiap Speaker Series