How to create a Malayalam Pronuciation Dictionary?

 Posted on September 30, 2022  |  Kavya Manohar

What is a phonetic lexicon? A pronunciation dictionary or a phonetic lexicon is a list of words and their pronunciation described as a sequence of phonemes. It is an essential component in the training and decoding of speech to text (STT) and text to speech (TTS) systems. A pronunciation dictionary is slightly different from a simple phonetic transcription. It should contain delimiters between phonemes, space is usually the default choice. [Read More]
malayalam  phonetic lexicon  g2p  pronunciation dictionary 

Mlphon: A Multifunctional Grapheme-Phoneme Conversion Tool Using Finite State Transducers

 Posted on September 20, 2022  |  Kavya Manohar

The Mlphon tool I had been working on, for the past couple of years was extensively expanded as part of my research work at College of Engineering Trivandrum. A detailed presentation of the phonemic features of Malayalam, their incorporation as a sequential ruleset in the form of finite state transucers, a quantitative evaluation of the applications of the tool are now available in the article, published by the open access journal, IEEE Access. [Read More]
malayalam  speech  g2p  p2g  publication 

മനുഷ്യഭാഷ, യന്ത്രബുദ്ധി

 Posted on June 30, 2022  |  

ശാസ്ത്രഗതി (ജൂൺ 2022) പ്രസിദ്ധീകരിച്ച ലേഖനം ആമുഖം മനുഷ്യർക്കു നൈസർഗ്ഗികമായുള ഒരു കഴിവാണ് ഭാഷ. കുഞ്ഞുങ്ങൾ ഏതു ഭാഷയും അവരുടെ പരിസരങ്ങളിൽ നിന്നും സ്വാഭാവികമായി നേടിയെടുക്കുന്നു. ഈ ശേഷി ഒരു കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറിന് കൈവരിക്കാൻ അത്ര എളുപ്പമല്ല. സിനിമാടിക്കറ്റ് ബുക്ക് ചെയ്യാനും, ഭക്ഷണം ഓർഡർ ചെയ്യാനും, മെയിലയക്കാനും, അലാറം വെയ്ക്കാനുമൊക്കെ ഇംഗ്ലീഷ് ഭാഷയിൽ പറഞ്ഞാൽ ചെയ്യാൻ കഴിയുന്ന ഡിജിറ്റൽ അസിസ്റ്റന്റുകളൊക്കെ ഇന്നുണ്ട്. ഇതിനർത്ഥം യന്ത്രങ്ങൾ ഭാഷാശേഷി കൈവരിച്ചുവെന്നാണോ? മലയാളമുൾപ്പെടെയുള്ള മറ്റു ഭാഷകളും കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറുകൾക്കു വഴങ്ങുമോ? അതിനു കൃത്രിമബുദ്ധി ആവശ്യമുണ്ടോ? ഈ വിഷയങ്ങളൊക്കെ പരിശോധിക്കുകയാണ് ഈ ലേഖനത്തിൽ. യന്ത്രങ്ങൾക്ക് സ്വയം പഠിക്കാനാകുമോ? ചുറ്റുപാടുമുള്ള ശബ്ദങ്ങൾ പിടിച്ചെടുക്കാനുള്ള ഉപകരണം എല്ലാ ഫോണുകളിലുമുണ്ട്. ആ ശബ്ദത്തിൽ നിന്നും സംസാരം വേർതിരിച്ച്, പറഞ്ഞതെന്തെന്ന് തിരിച്ചറിയാനുള്ള സംവിധാനം പല ഭാഷകളിലും ഇന്ന് സാധ്യമാണ്. [Read More]
Computational Linguistics  Research  Malayalam  Machine Learning  Artificial Intelligence 

Mozhi Malayalam TTS powered by Mlphon and Mlmorph

 Posted on May 25, 2022  |  Kavya Manohar

Krishna Sankar recently developed a Malayalam - English bilingual Text to Speech System, Mozhi. Check the web demo page and play around with your choice of words and listen to the natural speech it produces. Krishna has set a future goal of understanding the emotional content of the text and read it out accordingly. This is expected to make the application suitable for audio books. Generating audio for arbitrary speaker with very few training samples is another area he plans to work on. [Read More]
malayalam  speech  tts  mozhi 

Publishing Malayalam Speech Recognition Model

 Posted on October 19, 2021  |  Kavya Manohar

Malayalam speech recognition model trained on various openly available speech and text corpora using Kaldi toolkit is now released here. It is now available for testing on the Vosk-Browser Speech Recognition Demo website. This Malayalam model can be used with Vosk speech recognition toolkit which has bindings for Java, Javascript, C# and Python. A speech recognition architecture that works best in scenarios of limited speech data availability is called a pipeline model, where it is composed of an acoustic model, a language model and a phonetic lexicon. [Read More]
malayalam  speech  vosk  kaldi  asr 

The language of infinite words

 Posted on March 1, 2021  |  

I wrote this article for submission to a popular science writing competition by the Department of Science and Technology. Here is my research story, which did not make to grab the award. The story is based on our research on the morphological richness of Malayalam language. How many words are there in your language? How many of them do you know? Can you find all those words in a dictionary? [Read More]
malayalam  speech  morphology  linguistics  conference  tsd 

Text Speech and Dialogue: TSD 2020

 Posted on September 12, 2020  |  

I presented a paper on Quantitative Analysis of the Morphological Complexity of Malayalam Language at 23rd International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue: TSD 2020, Brno, Czech Republic, September 8–11 2020. The year being 2020, the entire conference happened in remote participation mode. Conference proceedings and pre-recorded presentation videos were made available to the participants and we discussed it over online zoom sessions. It was a novel experience and I am super excited about how I got feedbacks and ideas to work on, even after the live sessions. [Read More]
malayalam  speech  morphology  linguistics  conference  tsd 

A quantitative analysis of the morphological complexity of Malayalam

 Posted on September 7, 2020  |  

My work, Quantitative Analysis of the Morphological Complexity of Malayalam Language is accepted for presentation at the 23rd International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue to be held from September 8-10, 2020. The conference proceedings is published by Springer and you can read the paper here. I will share the presentation slides and video after the conference. See the associated data and code here. This blog-post is a bit detailed discussion of the following aspects, analysed in the paper: [Read More]
malayalam  script  morphology  text  information  TTR  MATTR 

Releasing Malayalam Speech Corpus

 Posted on August 25, 2020  |  

Originally Published in SMC Blog SMC announces the release of Malayalam Speech Corpus (MSC). It is the repository of curated speech samples collected using MSC web application. Speech samples are selected on the criteria that they have at least 3 positive reviews. MSC is a project launched by SMC to crowd source Malayalam speech samples from any contributor who can read out sentences and record them as speech samples. The MSC web app has provisions for recording voices and reviewing them. [Read More]
Speech Recognition  Malayalam  Corpus  Speech 

Talks on Speech Recognition Research and Malayalam Computing

 Posted on July 5, 2020  |  

Sharing the videos of two informal interviews I did during the past few months. In this video I talk with Hrishikesh Bhaskaran on my involvement with SMC and my projects. This was the part of an interview series hosted by Tinker Hub Foundation. In the following video I talk on Speech recognition systems in general, and on the voice corpus initiative by SMC. This interview is hosted by Mujeeb for IB Computing Youtube channel. [Read More]
Speech Recognition  Malayalam  Interview