1 Preparing Future multiSensorial inTerAction Research – human language technologies PF-STAR – the project. HUMAINE WP5-WS, Belfast, Dec. 2004

2 Introduction Multilingual and Multisensorial Communication (MMC) Speech-to-Speech Translation Detection and expressions of emotional states Core speech technologies for children Project Motivation: to contribute to advance research and lay the foundations for future efforts on the topic of MMC The project has capitalised on years of research already conducted in several national and international research projects (C-STAR, NESPOLE!, Verbmobil, SmartKom).

3 Participants Istituto Trentino di Cultura – Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica (ITC-irst) Institute for Pattern Recognition of Friedrich-Alexander Universitaet - Erlangen – Nurnberg (UERLN) Interactive Systems Laboratories at Universitaet Karlsruhe (UKA) Department of Electronic, Electrical & Computing Engineering of the University of Birmingham (UB) Kungl Tekniska Hogskolan (KTH) RWTH Computer Science Department Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Sezione di Padova – Fonetica e Dialettologia, CNR

4 to contribute to establish future activities in the field of MMC on firmer bases by providing: –technological baselines –comparative evaluations –and assessment of prospects of core technologies, which future research and development efforts can build from. to improve on, refine, establish, and align current achievements to turn them into true technological baselines along with careful assessments and evaluations. to contribute to establish future activities in the field of MMC on firmer bases by providing: –technological baselines –comparative evaluations –and assessment of prospects of core technologies, which future research and development efforts can build from. to improve on, refine, establish, and align current achievements to turn them into true technological baselines along with careful assessments and evaluations. Project objectives

5 WorkPackages (1) WP2 - Technologies for speech translation Comparative evaluation and integration of different technological baselines for speech translation over a range of application scenarios WP3 - Emotions: Speech Identification, extraction and assessment of prosodic and other linguistic cues correlated with and indicating the expression of emotional states in speech. Collection of database of audiovisual emotional speech

6 WP4 - Emotions: faces Definition and assessment of technological baselines for believable virtual agents in the form of talking heads which produce speech and communicate emotions using audiovisual speech synthesis. Collection of databases of audiovisual emotional speech. WP5 - Speech technologies for children Development of speech recognition baselines for English, German, Italian, and Swedish. They have been assessed with the aim of advancing technologies for children and aligning them to those for adults. Workpackages(2)

7 Management - organizational structure Workpackages Leaders – WP1: Fabio Pianesi (ITC-irst) – WP2: Marcello Federico (ITC-irst) – WP3: Anton Batliner (UERLN) – WP4: Björn Granström (KTH) – WP5: Martin Russell (UB) – WP6: Fabio Pianesi (ITC-irst)

8 Structure of the talk WP4: synthesis of faces WP3: synthesis (analysis) of speech WP3: analysis (recognition) of speech note: no recognition of faces and thus no fusion! note: technological baselines, not just basic research

9 More information: