Human Language Technologies – Publications

2009

Badenhorst J., van Heerden C., Davel M. and Barnard E., "Collecting and evaluating speech recognition corpora for nine Southern Bantu languages", In Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2009), pp 1-8, Athens, Greece, March/April 2009.

Barnard E., Davel M. and van Heerden C., "ASR Corpus design for resource-scarce languages", In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009), pp 2847-2850, September 2009.

Daelemans W., Groenewald H.J. and van Huyssteen G.B., "Prototype-based active learning for lemmatization", In Proceedings of the RANLP 2009 International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pp 65-70, June 2009.

Davel M. and Martirosian O.M., "Pronunciation dictionary development in resource-scarce environments", In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009), pp 2851-2854, September 2009.

Gumede T. and Plauche M., "Initial fieldwork for LWAZI: A telephone-based spoken dialog system for rural South Africa", In Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2009), pp 59-65, Athens, Greece, March/April 2009.

Sharma Grover A., Plauche M., Barnard E. and Kuun C., "HIV health information access using spoken dialogue systems: Touchstone vs. speech", In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies and Development (IEEE 2009), pp 95-107, Doha, Qatar, April 2009.

SA Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns (van Huyssteen, G.B.), "Afrikaanse Woordelys en Spelreels", June 2009.

W.J. Smit and Barnard E., "Continuous speech recognition with sparse coding", Computer Speech and Language, Vol 23(2), pp 200-219, April 2009.

Van Heerden C., Barnard E. and Davel M., "Basic speech recognition for spoken dialogues", In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009), pp 3003-3006, September 2009.

Van Heerden C., van Schalkwyk J. and Strope B., "Language modelling for what-with-where on GOOG-411", In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009), pp 991-994, September 2009.

Van Niekerk D.R. and Barnard E., "Phonetic alignment for speech synthesis in under-resourced languages", In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009), pp 880-883, September 2009.

2008

J.A.C. Badenhorst and M. Davel, “Data Requirements for Speaker Independent Acoustic Models”, In Proceedings of the 19th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 147-152, Cape Town, South Africa, November 2008.

E. Barnard, M. Plauche and M. Davel, “The Utility of Spoken Dialogue Systems”, In Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT), pp 13-16. December 2008.

M. Davel and E. Barnard, “Pronunciation Prediction with Default & Refine”, Computer Speech and Language, Vol 22, pp 374-393, October 2008.

A. de Waal, J.P. Venter and E. Barnard, “Applying Topic Modelling on Forensic Data”, Advances in Digital Forensics IV, Vol 285, pp 115-126, 2008.

A. de Waal and E. Barnard, “Evaluating Topic Models with Stability”, In Proceedings of the 19th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 79-84, Cape Town, South Africa, November 2008.

H.J. Groenewald and G.B. van Huyssteen, “Outomatiese Lemma-identifisering vir Afrikaans”, Literator, Vol 29(1), pp 65-91, April 2008.

N.T. Kleynhans and E. Barnard, “A Channel Normalization Technique for Speech Recognition in Mismatched Conditions”, In Proceedings of the 19th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 115-118, Cape Town, South Africa, November 2008.

B. Lorenz and E. Barnard, “A Brief Overview of Artificial Intelligence Focusing on Computational Models of Emotions”, Stimulating the Mind, pp 76-98, 2008.

J.A. Louw, “Speect: A Multilingual Text-to-speech System”, In Proceedings of the 19th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 165-168, Cape Town, South Africa, November 2008.

O.M. Martirosian and E. Barnard, “Speech-based Emotion Detection in a Resource-scarce Environment”, South African Computer Journal (SACJ), Vol 40, pp 18-22, 2008.

M.O. Martirosian and M. Davel, “ Acoustic Analysis of Diphthongs in Standard South African English”, In Proceedings of the 19th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 153-158, Cape Town, South Africa, November 2008.

T.J. Ndwe, E. Barnard, M. Dlodlo, D. Mashao, C. Kuun and A. Sharma, “Openphone User Engagement and Requirements Solicitation in Low Literacy Users”, In Proceedings of the 20th World Computer Congress, pp 189-193, Milan, Italy, September 2008.

T.J. Ndwe, M. Dlodlo, C. Kuun and A. Sharma, “Focus Groups in Rural User Studies”, In Proceedings of the Cybernetics and Information Technologies, Systems and Applications (CITSA) Conference, pp 180-184, Orlando, USA, June 2008.

T.J. Ndwe, A. Sharma, M. Kgampe and C. Kuun, “Dialogue Design for Openphone System”, In Proceedings of the 2nd CSIR Biennial Conference, pp 1, Pretoria, South Africa, 17 – 18 November 2008.

M. Peche, M. Davel and E. Barnard, “Porting a Spoken Language Identification System to a New Environment”, In Proceedings of the 19th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 103-107, Cape Town, South Africa, November 2008.

S.Pilon, M.J. Puttkammer and G.B. van Huyssteen, “Die Ontwikkeling van ‘n Woordafbreker en Kompositumanaliseerder vir Afrikaans”, Literator, Vol 29(1), pp 21-41, April 2008.

H.O. van Dyk and E. Barnard, “Naive Bayesian Classifiers for Multinomial Features: A Theoretical Analysis”, South African Computer Journal (SACJ), Vol 40, pp 37-43, 2008.

H.O. van Dyk and E. Barnard, “Binary Naïve Bayesian Classifiers for Correlated Gaussian Features: A Theoretical Analysis”, In Proceedings of the 19th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 9-14, Cape Town, South Africa, November 2008.

C.J. van Heerden and E. Barnard, “Speaker-specific Variability of Phoneme Durations”, South African Computer Journal (SACJ), Vol 40, pp 44-50, 2008.

G.B. van Huyssteen, “Bilingual Word List: Computational Linguistics / Tweetalige Woordelys: Rekenaarlinguistiek”, Literator, Vol 29(1), pp 249-272, April 2008.

G.B. van Huyssteen and S.E. Bosch, “Voorwoord: Mensetaaltegnologie vir Suid-Afrikaanse tale / Preface: Human Language Technology for South African Languages”, Literator, Vol 29(1), pp xi-xvii, April 2008.

D.R van Niekerk and E. Barnard, “Acoustic Cues Identifying Phonetic Transitions for Speech Segmentation”, In Proceedings of the 19th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 55-59, Cape Town, South Africa, November 2008.

D. Wissing and E. Barnard, “Vowel variations in Southern Sotho: An Acoustical Investigation”, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Vol 26 (2), pp 255-265, 2008.

S. Zerbian and E. Barnard, “Phonetics of Intonation in South African Bantu Languages”, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Vol 26 (2), pp 235-254, 2008.

S. Zerbian and E. Barnard, “Influences on Tone in Sepedi, a Southern Bantu Language”, Interspeech 2008 Incorporating SST08, pp 625, Brisbane, Australia, September 2008.

P.N. Zulu, G. Botha and E. Barnard, “Orthographic Measures of Language Distances Between the Official South African Languages”, The Literator: Journal of literary criticism comparative linguistics and literary studies, Vol 29 (1), pp 185-204, April 2008.

2007

J. Badenhorst and M. Davel, “The effect of speech rate variation on acoustic phone stability in Afrikaans speech recognition”, In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 6-9, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, November 2007.

G.R. Botha and E. Barnard, “Factors that affect the accuracy of text-based language identification”, In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 7-10, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, November 2007.

G.R. Botha, V.Z. Zimu and E. Barnard, “Text-based language identification for the South African languages”, SAIEE Africa Research Journal, Vol 98 (4), pp 141-146, December 2007.

M. Davel and E. Barnard, “Effort and Accuracy during Language Resource Generation: A Pronunciation Prediction Case Study”, SAIEE Africa Research Journal, Vol 98 (4), pp 124-128, December 2007.

A.J. De Waal, E. Barnard and E. du Preez, “Topic models applied to multilingual data”, In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 99-103, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, November 2007.

A.J. De Waal and T. Ritchey, “Combining morphological analysis and Bayesian Networks for strategic decision support”, Journal of the Operational Research Society of South Africa, Vol 23 (2), pp 105-121, December, 2007.

N. Govender, E. Barnard and M.H. Davel, “Pitch modelling for the Nguni languages”, South African Computer Journal, Vol 38, pp 28-39, June 2007.

R.S.M. Kato and E. Barnard, “Statistical translation with scarce resources: a South African case study”, SAIEE Africa Research Journal, Vol 98 (4), pp 136-140, December 2007.

O.M. Martirosian and E. Barnard, “Speech-based emotion detection in a resource-scarce environment”, In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 105-108, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, November 2007.

O.M. Martirosian and M. Davel, “Error analysis of a public domain pronunciation dictionary”, In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 13-16, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, November 2007.

M. Peche, M. Davel and E. Barnard, “Phonotactic spoken language identification with limited training data”, In Proceedings of the 8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH-2007), pp 1537-1540, Antwerp, Belgium, August 2007.

C.M. Van der Walt and E. Barnard, “Data characteristics that determine classifier performance”, SAIEE Africa Research Journal, Vol 98 (3), pp 87-93, September 2007.

C.M Van der Walt and E. Barnard, “Measures for the characterisation of pattern-recognition data sets”, In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 75-78, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, November 2007.

E. van Dyk and E. Barnard, “Naive Bayesian classifiers for multinomial features: a theoretical analysis”, In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 87-91, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, November 2007.

C.J. Van Heerden and E. Barnard, “Speech rate normalization used to improve speaker verification”, SAIEE Africa Research Journal, Vol 98 (4), pp 129-135, December 2007.

C.J. Van Heerden and E. Barnard, “Durations of context-dependent phonemes: a new feature in speaker verification”, Speaker Classification II, Springer, pp 93-103, September 2007

C.J. Van Heerden and E. Barnard, “Speaker-specific variability of phoneme durations”, In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 111-114, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, November 2007.

D.R. Van Niekerk and E. Barnard, “Important factors in HMM-based phonetic segmentation”, In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA), pp 25-28, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, November 2007.

J.P. Venter, A. De Waal, C.J. Williers, “Specialising CRISP-DM Evidence Mining”, International Federation for Information Processing, Advances in Digital Forensics III, eds. Shenoi, S., Vol 242, pp 303-314, Boston: Springer, 2007.

P. Zulu, “Orthographic Based Clustering of South Africa’s Official Languages», In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, November 2007.

2006

C.J . van Heerden and E. Barnard, “Speech Rate Normalization Used to Improve Speaker Verification”, In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 2-7, Parys, November 2006.

M.Davel and E. Barnard, “Effort and Accuracy during Language Resource Generation: A Pronunciation Prediction Case Study”, In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 14 - 17, Parys, November 2006.

K Ronald and E. Barnard ,“Statistical Translation with Scarce Resources - A South African Case Study”, In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 18-22 Parys, November 2006.

J.A.C Badenhorst, D.R van Niekerk and E Barnard ,“Automatic systems for assistance in improving pronunciations” ,In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 23- 29 Parys, November 2006.

J. A. Louw and M. Davel,“Halfphones: A Backoff Mechanism for Diphone Unit Selection Synthesis”. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 42-45 Parys, November 2006.

G. Botha, V. Zimu and E. Barnard. “Text based Language Identification for the South African Languages”, In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 46 -52 Parys, November 2006.

E. Barnard and M. Davel, “Automatic error detection in alignments for speech synthesis”, In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 53- 56 Parys, November 2006.

N. Zulu and E. Barnard. “Dialect Distances Based on Orthographic and Phonetic Transcriptions.” In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 66 - 70 Parys, November 2006.

C van der Walt and E. Barnard. “ Data characteristics that determine classifier performance”, In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 166 -171 Parys, November 2006.

E. Barnard, N Govender, V. Zimu, C. Kuun and M. Davel, “Computational models of prosody in the Nguni languages”, ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop, Stellenbosch, South Africa, April 2006.

M. Davel and E. Barnard, “Developing consistent pronunciation variants”, Interspeech, Pittsburgh, USA, September 2006.

M. Davel and E. Barnard, “Bootstrapping Pronunciation Dictionaries – a South African case study”, CSIR Research and Innovation Conference, February 2006.

M. Davel and E. Barnard, “Bootstrapping Pronunciation Dictionaries”, South African Journal of Science, 2006.

M. Davel and E. Barnard, “Extracting pronunciation rules for phonemic variants”, ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop, Stellenbosch, South Africa, April 2006.

S. Goronzy, L. Mayfield Tomokiyo, E. Barnard and M. Davel, “Chapter 9: Other challenges: non-native speech, dialects, accents, and local interfaces”, In Multilingual Speech Processing, edited by T. Schultz and K. Kirchoff, Elsevier, April 2006.

J.A. Louw, M. Davel and E. Barnard, “A general-purpose IsiZulu Speech Synthesiser”, South African journal of African languages, 2006.

2005

G. Botha and E. Barnard, “Two approaches to gathering text corpora from the World Wide Web”, In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 194, Langebaan, South Africa, November 2005.

J.P.L. Cloete, H.N. Patel, L. Coetzee and E. Barnard, “Technology in Support of Accessible E-Government”, DEXA E-gov 2005, September 2005, Copenhagen, Denmark.

M Davel and E. Barnard, “Obtaining a minimal set of rewrite rules”, In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 139-144, Langebaan, South Africa, November 2005.

M. Davel, “Pronunciation Modelling and Bootstrapping”, PhD thesis, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa, August 2005.

M. Davel and E. Barnard, “Bootstrapping for the efficient development of pronunciation dictionaries”, Transactions of the SAIEE: Special Issue on Pattern Recognition: Theory and Applications, pp. 6-10, March 2005.

M. Davel and E. Barnard, “Bootstrapping Pronunciation Dictionaries: Practical Issues”, in Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech), Lisbon, Portugal, September 2005.

N. Govender, E. Barnard and M. Davel, “Developing Intonation Corpora for isiXhosa and isiZulu”, In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 129-132, Langebaan, South Africa, November 2005.

N. Govender, E. Barnard and M. Davel, “Fundamental frequency and tone in isiZulu: initial experiments”, in Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech), Lisbon, Portugal, September 2005.

G. Joubert and E. Barnard, “The effect of network degradation on speech recognition”, In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 193, Langebaan, South Africa, November 2005.

N. T. Kleynhans and E Barnard, “Language dependence in multilingual speaker verification”, In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 117-121, Langebaan, South Africa, November 2005.

C. Kuun, V. Zimu, E. Barnard and M. Davel, “Statistical investigations into isiZulu intonation”, In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 111-115, Langebaan, South Africa, November 2005.

J.A. Louw, M. Davel and E. Barnard, “A general-purpose IsiZulu Speech Synthesiser”, The 14th International Conference of the African Language Association of Southern Africa (ALASA), Johannesburg, South Africa, July 2005.

S. Naidoo, E. Barnard and M. Davel, “Telephone based speech interfaces in the developing world, from the perspective of human-human communication”, The 14th International Conference of the African Language Association of Southern Africa (ALASA), Johannesburg, South Africa, July 2005.

S. Naidoo and E. Barnard, “Applying the Nass Model to developing world telephone interfaces”, The 5th International Cyberspace Conference on Ergonomics (Cyberg), September 2005.

C.J. van Heerden and E. Barnard, “Using timing information in speaker verification” In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 53-57, Langebaan, South Africa, November 2005.

2004

L. Butgereit, “Using Human Language Technologies in aviation weather applications”, IEEE Africon 2004 Conference, Gabarone, Botswana, September 2004.

J.P.L. Cloete, E. Barnard and H. Patel, “Initial experiments on the effectiveness of telephone access to government services” DEXA E-gov 2004, Zaragoza, Spain, August 2004.

Coetzee L and Barnard E, Pattern Recognition in Service of People with Disabilities In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 75-80, Grabouw, November 2004.

Davel M and Barnard E, “A default-and-refinement approach to pronunciation prediction” In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 119-123, Grabouw, November 2004.

Davel M and Barnard E, “The Efficient Generation of Pronunciation Dictionaries: Machine Learning Factors during Bootstrapping” In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Korea, 2004.

Davel M and Barnard E, “The Efficient Generation of Pronunciation Dictionaries: Human Factors during Bootstrapping” In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Korea, 2004.

Gouws E, Wolvaardt, K, Kleynhans, N and Barnard E, “Appropriate baseline values for HMM-based speech recognition” (abstract) In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, p. 169, Grabouw, November 2004.

Joubert L, Zimu V, Davel M and Barnard E, “A framework for bootstrapping morphological decomposition” (abstract) In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, p. 171, Grabouw, November 2004.

Louw JA and Barnard E, “Automatic intonation modeling with INTSINT” In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, pp. 107-111, Grabouw, November 2004.

Skhosana Goodwill, “Machine Translation: Enter the Mob” The Idlelo Open Source Conference, Cape Town, January 2004.

Smit W and Barnard E, “Efficient coding leads to novel features for speech recognition” In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa, p. 99-102, Grabouw, November 2004.

2003

Barnard E, Cloete JPL, Coetzee L and Patel H, “Towards effective telephone-based delivery of government services” 9th International Winelands Conference, Stellenbosch, 2003.

Barnard E., Cloete L., Patel H, “Language and Technology Literacy Barriers to Accessing Government Services” LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE, Issue 2739, 2003, Pages 37-42

M. Davel and E. Barnard, “Human Language Technologies in the Developing World”, The 12th International Conference of the African Language Association of Southern Africa (ALASA), Stellenbosch, South Africa, July 2003.

Davel M and Barnard E, “Bootstrapping in Language Resource Generation” Proceedings of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa Symposium, November 2003.

M. Davel, “HLT in Peacekeeping”, MICSSA 2003: The Military Information and Communications Symposium of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa, November 2003.

Easton H, Nakene M, Naidoo S and Kafidi PL, “Validating the user-centred design process within a developing context” CHI-SA 2003 Conference, Johannesburg, 2003.

G. Skhosana, “Capturing metaphor evolution in user interfaces”, CHI-SA 2003 Conference, Johannesburg, South Africa, November 2003.