CENTRE FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

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VOCALISE

Title

VOCALISE: SMS-to-Speech synthesis

Abstract

According to a recent study, more than 9 million Belgian have a mobile phone, the sales of which increased by 15% in 2006. Paradoxically, the mobile phone, first designed for calls, was rapidly used as a mobile typewriter able to send short messages. Consumers imposed this new use on telephone operators, who soon took advantage of it as a selling point. The SMS was born.

Aware of this social phenomenon, the CENTAL initiated in 2004, in the French speaking part of Belgium, the project "Faites don de vos SMS à la Science": 75,000 SMS were gathered, i.e. the most important SMS corpus to this day! A scientific study carried out on this corpus allowed the CENTAL to become an expert, for Belgian French, on the differences between the SMS and the standard language. Taking advantage of this experience and willing to carry out similar studies on other languages, the centre initiated the project "sms4science" in 2007.

Nowadays, telephone operators realize that a lot of people cannot access short messages content: blind and visually impaired people, drivers, landline customers, etc. Therefore, their idea is to provide this special clientele with an additional service: the vocalization of text messages using text-to-speech synthesis technologies.

Yet, the SMS language is so far from standard written norm (contractions, agglutinations, simplifications, etc.), classical text-to-speech synthesis systems cannot work. On this basis, the CENTAL proposed to Multitel, a Walloon research centre expert in both speech synthesis and pattern recognition, to help in developing an SMS-to-speech synthesis system within the framework of a Walloon Post-Doc fellowship. Attentive to the results of this research, Proximus, for its part, proposed to test the system all along the project.

Région wallonne

First Post-Doc

Duration

  • 24 months.
  • Start: Avril 2008.

Researcher

Dr Richard BEAUFORT

Advisor

Prof. Cédrick Fairon,
Director of the CENTAL

Industrial partners