Cole, Ronald A. & Macon, Michael W. University of Colorado Boulder $99,683 ($49,842 from HCI and $49,841 from EIA) in FY99 - 12 mos.
Advancing Human Language Technology in Brazil and the United States Through Collaborative Research on Spoken Language Systems
This is the first year funding of a two-year continuing award. This project entails collaborative research and technology transfer leading to a Brazilian Portuguese version of the CSLU Speech Toolkit, an integrated software platform for learning about, researching and developing spoken language systems. We will mentor researchers from two universities in Brazil via collaborative workshops/training sessions and collaborate to advance the state-of-the-art of spoken language technology. Our goal is to extend the toolkit's capabilities to include Brazilian Portuguese speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis and use these technologies to develop systems for information access and language training. This will entail creation of suitable language resources (lexicons, corpora), development of software infrastructure, and basic research to improve the underlying technology. We will then share our knowledge, software, and language resources by distributing the toolkit and language resources at no cost to academic institutions throughout the United States and Brazil to spur growth in this area of research and, in the long term, improve access to information by the citizens of both Brazil and the U.S.
