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How you can reuse your speech profile even on deepfrozen Language resource center computers
- “A [Windows Speech] profile is basically the collection of all settings and information about how to recognize your voice when using Windows Speech Recognition. Before changing the language used or letting other persons use Windows Speech Recognition it is best to create a new profile so that your current one will remain unaltered”.
- To be able reuse your effort training the computer to recognize your voice speaking in your study language – even though the LRC Windows 7 computers get reset when restarted -, you can backup, and later reload, your Speech Profile, preferably to your H:-drive.
- The Microsoft tool that allows you to do that has been put on WSRProfile.exe desktop of the LRC Windows 7 PCs. I can copy these instructions directly from the Microsoft blog page:
- Double-click WSRProfile.exe to start the WSR Profile tool wizard.
- To back up a speech profile using the WSR Profile tool, select Backup my speech profile.
- In the Select your Speech Profile dialog box, choose the speech profile you wish to back up and then click Next.
- The wizard will prompt you for a filename and location to save the file. When you have entered this information, click Next. The WSR Profile tool wizard will start the backup process of the selected speech profile.
- After the backup operation successfully finishes, click Close .
- In the Select your Speech Profile dialog box, choose the speech profile you wish to back up and then click Next.
- To restore a speech profile using the WSR Profile tool, select Restore my Speech Profile.
- On the File to Restore wizard page, click Browse and locate the backed up speech profile, and then click Next.
- Choose the speech profile you want to restore to.
- Select Use the current speech profile if you want to overwrite the current default speech profile.
- Select Create a new speech profile if you want to restore to a new speech profile. If you choose to restore to a new speech profile you will be prompted to provide a name for the new profile.
- After the restore operation successfully finishes, click Close.
Example 7: Exercise dictating in German to an LRC Windows 7 computer
How can we get language students more speaking practice with qualified, but affordable feedback ? Native speaker contact remains difficult to organize even in the days of online conferencing. The LRC hosts language tutoring, but numbers are limited. Enter speech recognition, the holy grail of iCALL, much easier for learners to relate to than the voice graph that digital audio can be broken down to, and thus for a long time a standout feature of costly second-language-acquisition packages like Auralog Tell-me-More (speech recognition in English tested here) – but now the LRC has Windows 7 Enterprise (and its free add-on language packs), and another crucial prerequisite: headphones with excellent microphones.
We are setting up the new Windows 7 computers in the LRC to allow for speech recognition in Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. Here is an example of me using this facility for a practicing my German during a dictation exercise:
Granted, German is my native tongue; but the example text is from the online component for the final chapter of the “Treffpunkt Deutsch” 1st-year textbook in use here, which sends the readers to the website of the Swiss (-German) employment agency.
Apart from infrequent words ("Archiven") and Lehnwörtern ("Bachelor" etc.), Windows 7 speech recognition accuracy seems quite impressive. The above example was actually my first dictation, except that immediately beforehand, I invested a few minutes into the standard Windows 7 speech recognition training (aimed at training the user, although may behind the scenes teach the computer a few things about the speaker already also) and a few more minutes of voice training (this one is meant exclusively for the computer, but the user can also see it fail and why). The – rather simple trick to boost speech recognition results – certainly accessible to our students – seems to be to speak not only clearly, but also slowly, with short pauses between most words.
Speech recognition in these languages is a feature of the Windows 7 (Enterprise/Ultimate version) “language packs” that we installed and switched to – that is why the entire computer interface appears in German. Practicing the L2 with (computer—operating) “voice commands” (instead of with a mouse) is also possible, simpler than replacing the keyboard (mostly) by voice, but not as easy to devise homework exercises for.
Tips for designing exercises using speech recognition: As the example shows ("Archiven") , doing all corrections by voice can quickly become tedious. But there is no pedagogical need to have your students’ bang their heads against this wall. Instead, just ask your students to correct their automatically recognized words manually at the end of their video, after their dictation. This way both you and your students get a clear summary of what they achieved – even clearer if they dictate in MS-Word with the spell and grammar check for the language (automatic with the switch to the language pack for the language) and (using key combination CTRL+SHIFT+E) track changes. We will show you later TBA:how we now enable students to easily record their screen and TBA:upload their screencast into Moodle Kaltura.
UIowa.edu phonetics website for learners of English, German and Spanish
Hone your foreign language pronunciation skills by learning about phonetics: This oft-recommended University of Iowa phonetics website “contains animated libraries of the phonetic sounds (….) for each consonant and vowel”, including “an animated articulatory diagram, a step-by-step description, and video-audio of the sound spoken in context”.
Windows 7 US-English with German language pack
Just to make sure, we are still in EDT… 
(and the date and other formats do not get changed with the display language either, but so does help and feedback). 
Can you find the error in Microsoft’s German localization in the command line window? Post it below.
Making audio cues for model imitation/question-response oral exams with Sanako Study 1200
We can easily record and post-process audio files in the LRC for use with the Sanako Study 1200 oral exam activities.
This can work not only for outcome exams (course- or chapter-wise), but also or formative assessment:
Think converting your textbook-based “drills” into Sanako, like repetitively recapitulating the newly acquired vocabulary item “donut” with different cues:
Example: “What can you do with [student can enter her favorite new vocabulary item for the current class] on [teacher can ask for one social web service after the other that her students likely are familiar with]?”. In response, student has to practice vocabularry item by forming sentences that fit the vocabulary item that fit like in the whiteboard example.
We can add to these recordings the features explained in the slide below.
I’d be happy to play you examples from this slide – and more – in the LRC (not to be published here so that the exam files can be reused).
Setting up European Union translation memories and document corpora for SDL-Trados
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SDL-Trados installation allows the translation program to teach this industry-standard computer-aided translation application . So far, however, we had no actually translation memory loaded into this translation software.
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The European Union is a powerhouse for translation and interpreting – at least for the wide range of their member languages many of which are world languages – , and makes some of their resources – which have been set up for translation and interpreting study use here before – available to the community free of charge as reported during a variety of LREC’s.
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This spring, the Language Technology Group at the Joint Research Centre of the European Union this spring updated their translation memory offer DTG-TM can fill that void at least for the European Languages that have a translation component at UNC-Charlotte.
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We download on demand (too big to store: http://langtech.jrc.ec.europa.eu/DGT-TM.html#Download)
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Is the DGT-TM 2011 truly a superset of the 2007, or should both be merged? probably too much work?
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and extract only the language pairs with English and the language only the languages “1”ed here : “G:\myfiles\doc\education\humanities\computer_linguistics\corpus\texts\multi\DGT-tm\DGT-tm_statistics.xlsx” (using “G:\myfiles\doc\education\humanities\computer_linguistics\corpus\texts\multi\DGT-tm\TMXtract.exe”)
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and convert
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English is the source language by default, but should be the target language in our programs,
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The TMX format this translation memory is distributed provided in, should be “upgradeable ” to the SDL Trados Studio 2011/2011 SP1 format in the Upgrade Translation Memories wizard”.,
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TBA:where is this component?
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configure the Trados to load the translation memory
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how much computing resources does this use up?
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how do you load a tm?
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can you load in demand instead of preload all?
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- Here are the statistics for the translation memories for “our” languages
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uncc Language Language code Number of units in DGT – release 2007 Number of units in DGT – release 2011 1 English EN 2187504 2286514 1 German DE 532668 1922568 1 Greek EL 371039 1901490 1 Spanish ES 509054 1907649 1 French FR 1106442 1853773 1 Italian IT 542873 1926532 1 Polish PL 1052136 1879469 1 Portuguese PT 945203 1922585 Total 8 8 7246919 15600580
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Would it be of interest to have the document-focused jrc-acquis distribution of the materials underlying the translation materials available on student/teachers TRADOS computers so that sample texts can be loaded for which reliable translation suggestions will be available – this is not certain for texts from all domains – and the use of a translation memory can be trained in under realistic conditions?
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“The DGT Translation Memory is a collection of translation units, from which the full text cannot be reproduced. The JRC-Acquis is mostly a collection of full texts with additional information on which sentences are aligned with each other.”
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It remains to be seen how easily one can transfer documents from this distribution into Trados to work with the translation memory
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Here is where to download:
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uncc
lang
inc
1
de
1
en
1
es
1
fr
1
it
1
pl
1
pt
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The JRC-Acquis comes with these statistics:
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uncc
Language ISO code
Number of texts
Total No words
Total No characters
Average No words
1
de
23541
32059892
232748675
1361.87
1
en
23545
34588383
210692059
1469.03
1
es
23573
38926161
238016756
1651.3
1
fr
23627
39100499
234758290
1654.91
1
it
23472
35764670
230677013
1523.72
1
pl
23478
29713003
214464026
1265.57
1
pt
23505
37221668
227499418
1583.56
Total
7
164741
247374276
1588856237
10509.96
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- What other multi corpora are there (for other domains and other non-European languages)?
Spring 2012 Faculty Workshop II: Oral Proficiency testing with Audacity/Sanako
- View screens (best viewed side by side, but note that left and right screen are not synchronized):
- for full slide show (note the included short links for convenient further reading), left screen
- for Sanako interface and full audio track, right screen
.
- for full slide show (note the included short links for convenient further reading), left screen
- Table of contents:
- Overview of a Sanako Oral Exam
- Examples of Exam teachers’ exam question recordings
- Example of a Sanako Exam
- Loop induction
- creating an exam question recording
- by taking a Sanako exam as a student
- Step-by-Step of administering a Sanako oral exam
- Grading Sanako oral exam student files
- Sanako voice insert for
- facilitating recording oral assignments for student without hard-coded pauses
- commenting on student responses during grading
- Sanako voice insert for
- Sanako authoring tool for providing visual on top of aural cues to students
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Learning usage samples: Sanako oral exam, Kaltura webcam presentation, Dictation with speech recognition, Sanako written exam, Chinese and Japanese interactive stroke-order practice
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