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9th November 2004 - CSR Europe Conference |
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LLSTI Director Roger Tucker joined with Hewlett Packard, Proctor & Gamble and the
Royal College of Nurses at a workshop on Meeting the Millenium Deveopment Goals - a Business Case
for the Bottom of the Pyramid. A full report of this workshop is available on request.
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15th September 2004 - Zulu demo
available |
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Examples of the speech produced by the Zulu
TTS system are now available
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23rd August 2004 - Hindi demo
available |
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Examples of the speech produced by the Hindi
TTS system are available here.
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23 May 2004 - 3rd LLSTI
Workshop |
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14 delegates attended the third
partners workshop 22-23 May, which was held in Lisbon to coincide with the
Language Resource & Evaluation conference (LREC
2004) the following week.
The first day had presentations from the five language partners, and the three
partners working on tools - IIIT Hyderabad, HP Labs India and CSIR Pretoria. The
second day was more open discussion around the issue of tone in African tonal
languages, evaluation, applications and the need for more documentation on
Festival. Between them the partners undertook to produce improved documentation
which will be available in September.
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24 May 2004 - LREC workshop on
Minority Languages |
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LLSTI partners Outside Echo and IIIT Hyderabad took
part in this LREC satellite workshop
organised by SALTMIL (a special
interest group of ISCA focusing on Speech and
Language Technology for Minority Languages) which brought together language
technologists working on the world's less prominent languages. Languages covered
by participants included Amharic, Basque, Catalan, Irish, Komi and Welsh.
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27 Jan 2004 - Sponsorship for
Kiswahili |
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The University of Nairobi is set to be the latest addition to the growing LLSTI partnership, thanks to
the sponsorship of Oneworld International, who are already
sponsoring Tamil development at IISc Bangalore . The target applications for
Kiswahili TTS are phone-based voice systems which allow wider access to the SMS
and internet services being rolled out as part of the Open Knowledge Network (OKN)
in Kenya. One of the first
services to be made available by voice will be a job alert which allows users
to be notified as soon as a job fitting their profile becomes available.
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10 Jan 2004 - LLSTI Workshop on a Framework for Multi-Lingual Morphological Decomposition |
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This workshop was hosted by partners IIIT Hyderabad 9 & 10 January to thrash out the final details of the MD framework. Having already considered Hindi, Telegu and English, we
looked at details of Tamil, Russian and other languages known by the workshop participants.
Input from the partners looking at Ibibio and isiZulu had already been received. The
prototype tool written in perl will be available shortly for general testing by all the partners and other interested parties.
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7 Jan 2004 - SCALLA 2004 |
SCALLA (Sharing Capability in Localisation & Human Language Technologies) 2004 was the third in a series of conferences with experts from diverse disciplines
(anthropologists & journalists as well as technical experts) from South Asia & Europe coming together to focus on issues of people-centred localisation & HLT. This year's conference was held 5 to 7 January in Kathmandu, and had the theme
Crossing the Digital Divide - shaping technologies to meet human needs
with LLSTI partners Outside Echo, IIIT Hyderabad and IISc Bangalore all there. Roger Tucker & Ksenia Shalonova (Outside Echo) overviewed LLSTI, and Prof Sangal (IIIT Hyderabad)
overviewed their work on machine translation into different Indian languages. The
MD Framework (see above) being written by Prof Sangal's group has grown out of this experience in machine translation.
The need for collaborative efforts and open source approaches also came out strongly in other presentations - notably that of Dr Om Vikas, Senior Director at the Indian Ministry of IT.
The conference has facilitated a number of collaborations, including new opportunities for LLSTI in South Asia - watch this space.
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13 Dec 2003 - LLSTI at ICT4D |
ICT4D was the exhibition accompanying the
World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) at Geneva in December 2003. A number of LLSTI partners were there - Outside Echo, CSIR, HP Labs India, as well as sponsors DfID, IDRC & Oneworld
International.
Outside Echo organised a seminar Overcoming ICT Access Barriers through
Voice, which was attended by people with a wide range of interests, from content creators through to the mobile sector. Roger Tucker (Outside Echo) explained the rationale behind LLSTI , whilst Etienne Barnard (CSIR) and K S R Anjelaleyu (HP Labs India) gave overviews of their work on Local Langauge Speech Technology. The demonstration of HP Labs voice-based Railway Reservation System made a particularly strong impression.
LLSTI also featured prominently on the Department of Science & Technology South Africa stand,
and a steady stream of LLSTI publicity leaflets were handed to interested people during the week.
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