Language, voice and multimedia technologies at the service of the language industry

The strategic research project has focused on practical solutions for the language industry

Three demos have been developed: the demo of automatic extraction of opinions from literary criticism, the demo of a video finder (automatic transcription and dubbing) and the demo of a personal language teacher by voice online

Usurbil, 27 May 2015

The results of the Ber2Tek research project were presented today in Usurbil, at an event held at Elhuyar headquarters. The research has been carried out by the Technological Center VICOMTECH-IK4, the Foundation TECNALIA Research and Innovation, the consortium formed by the research groups Aholkularitza and IXA of the UPV/EHU and Elhuyar, for three years (2012-2014), subsidized by the Department of Economic Development and Competitiveness of the Basque Culture

The main objective of the Ber2Tek project has been research into language and speech technologies and making the results of application research available to the public. To show how these technologies can contribute to the language industry, three demos have been built in the fields of content, translation and language teaching, since the language industry and, in particular, the Basque industry, needs advanced technologies to be competitive in a globalized, interconnected and multilingual environment.

For the content area a demo has been mounted that shows what is the extraction of opinions or the technology of analysis of feelings. The demo takes a text, analyzes if it has a subjective opinion and, if it has it, automatically deducts whether it is positive or negative. This technology can have multiple applications and is especially interesting for companies, as they can easily know what is said on the network about them or about their products (in many places and in several languages). For the realization of the demo has been used the "Hemeroteca de las crítica" of the web armiarma.eus (which brings together more than 5,000 literary reviews in Basque from various media and publications) and each of its criticisms has been automatically assigned a score applying the technology of extraction of opinions in Basque developed in Ber2Tek. The selection of author, work, year or other parameter in the web of the demo allows to visualize the scores graphically and analyze the own criticism and its positive and negative words (on which technology is based to assign a score).

For the translation area we have prepared a multimedia search engine. Several videos have been received in Spanish or Basque and have been automatically transcribed with voice knowledge. Thus, once the text of these videos is obtained, you can search these videos and, if desired, jump directly to the moment when the word is indicated. In addition, these transcriptions are automatically translated into Spanish, Basque or English, so subtitles can be created automatically in these languages. And from these translations, using speech synthesis technology, you can create audio, that is, perform automatic bending. In the event that these videos are conferences of certain speakers, in addition, dubbing in the target language can mimic the voice of the original speaker using voice transformation technology.

Finally, for the teaching sector we have made a demo of a personal tutor of language teaching. 3 years ago, at the end of the BerbaTek project, we did something similar, but this time it has more possibilities. In addition, this was a desktop application that is online and that anyone can try. The tutor of Demo is a 3D avatar with which we communicate in Basque, orally (he speaks in Basque and understands what is said in Basque orally). The tutor guides us in exercises created automatically to work the verb, the decline or the understanding; evaluates our pronunciation; we can ask you about the behavior of certain verbs; we can consult you how a number is written; we can ask you to search for a word in the dictionary and he shows us results in several dictionaries…

Before the Ber2Tek project, the consortium of 5 agents participated in the BerbaTek project in the period 2009-2011, making three more demos. Previously worked together on the Anhitz project between 2006 and 2008 and prepared the demo of a virtual scientific expert. The Hizking XXI project was carried out in 2002-2004.

At this morning's appearance in Usurbil, at the headquarters of Elhuyar, to give all the explanations about the Ber2Tek project and present their demos, three people participated:

• Leire Cancio, director general of the Elhuyar Foundation.
• Jokin Azkue, Department of Education, Linguistic Policy and Culture of the Basque Government, Director of Promotion of the Basque Country
• Igor Leturia, Elhuyar R&D team member and project coordinator.

Article about Ber2Tek (in Basque) at http://www.zientzia.eus/

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