|
Oriental COCOSDA 2004
The International Committee
for the Co-ordination and Standardization of Speech Databases and
Assessment Techniques, COCOSDA, has been established to encourage and
promote international interaction and cooperation in the foundation
areas of Spoken Language Resources and Speech Input/Output Systems
Assessment.
The importance of collaboration which transcends national boundaries is
increasingly recognized. This is both because of the practical and
scientific value attached to systematic work which encompasses a range
of languages and analytic approaches and also because of the practical
need to establish common methods of performance description and
quantitative comparison.
Oriental COCOSDA is an international workshop held annually by the
oriental chapter of The International Committee for the Co-ordination
and Standardization of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques for
Speech Input/Output. The first preparatory meeting was held in Hong Kong
and then the past six workshops were held in Japan, Taiwan, China
Mainland, Korea, Thailand and Singapore. The seventh workshop is planned
to be held in India.
Mission Statement of COCOSDA
COCOSDA supports the development of spoken language resources and speech
technology evaluation. For the former, COCOSDA promotes the development
of distinctive types of spoken language data corpora for the purpose of
building and/or evaluating current or future spoken language technology.
For the latter COCOSDA offers coordination of projects and research
efforts to improve their efficiency.
Oriental COCOSDA 2004 has been planned to be held in India during 17-19
November 2004 along with an ‘International Conference on Speech and
Language Technology’. ORIENTAL COCOSDA 2004 will provide opportunities
for presentations and group discussions with researchers in the areas of
focal interest from different countries. Better participation is
expected from Indian sub-continental countries thereby providing a forum
of discussion on various languages spoken in the region. India, the host
of this conference, is a multi-lingual country, several languages and
various dialects of those languages are used in different parts of the
country. Multilinguality need not be textual only, but will take on
spoken form, when information services are to reach across different
language groups. Information access by speech will need to handle
multiple languages to service customers from different language groups
from different regions within a country or travelers from abroad.
According to experts, Speech recognition and Speech synthesis technology
can be very useful in the Indian context as it provides an easy
interface for interacting with computers. Using such a convenient means
of rendering information to or from the machine would mean that the
end-user need not be computer literate and still can use the power of
the IT industry.
The current requirement is to work on development of Speech Corpora for
various Indian languages, development of Speech Recognition and Speech
Synthesis systems. Our goal is to cover more Indian languages and then
to build a multilingual speech recognizer and synthesizer for the Indian
languages based on a multilingual phone set.
There is an international trend towards speech-enabling the
technological products and this can see the light of the day in Indian
language context, when the research outcomes of speech technology are
applied. Conducting Oriental COCOSDA workshop in India will help in
boosting the research and development in the field of Speech Technology
and will help in enthusing the interest towards Speech Technology.
|
