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A Network of Excellence forging the
Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance

Collaboration Agreement between Simple4All and META-NET


 

The Network of Excellence “Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society”, henceforth META-NET, and the FP7 STREP project Simple4All, both established within Framework Programme 7, recognise the complementarity of their objectives and declare their intent for multi-level collaboration.

Scope and Objectives of the Participants

The overall aim of the Simple4All project is to develop methods that enable the construction of spoken interaction systems from audio and text data. The systems will be able to learn after deployment, so that general purpose or specialised systems for any domain or language will become feasible. Simple4All has four objectives: 1) Adaptability, that is the creation of highly portable and adaptable speech synthesis technology suitable for any domain or language; 2) Learning from data and interaction, in order to provide a complete, consistent framework in which every component of a speech synthesis system can be learned and improved; 3) Speaking style, that is to enable the generation of natural, conversational, highly expressive synthetic speech which is appropriate to the wider context; and 4) Demonstration and evaluation: automatic creation of a new speech synthesiser from scratch, and feedback-driven online learning, with perceptual evaluations. Via work in these areas, Simple4All will push the borders of current speech technology that relies on labelled data and human expertise.

META-NET is a Network of Excellence dedicated to the technological foundations of the European multilingual information society. Its main goals are: to build a strategic alliance of national and international research programmes, corporate users and commercial technology providers and language communities; to strengthen the European research community through research networking and by creating new schemes and structures for sharing resources, that is the META-SHARE infrastructure; and to build bridges by approaching open problems in collaboration with other research fields such as machine learning, social computing, cognitive systems, knowledge technologies and multimedia content. META-NET will lead to a strong language technology community with ties to other R&D communities, with a network into industry and public administration, and with visions and plans for a strategic research agenda, to support the sustainability of the European, multilingual information society.

Areas of collaboration

Simple4All is creating tools and data resources related to spoken interaction systems. The goal is to make these tools publicly available for future research and / or as a basis for industrial applications. Simple4All can greatly benefit from distributing their resources via META-SHARE, since META-SHARE will provide a sustainable, widely accepted and widely used infrastructure for resource sharing in the area of language technologies. META-NET will benefit from Simple4All since speech related resources are not developed within META-NET itself, so Simple4All helps to fill an important area.

Based on this complementary relation between the two projects, the following areas of collaboration are defined within this agreement.

  • Both projects may envisage a joint publication about the above topic until the end of 2012.

  • Simple4All will provide access to its tools and data resources via the META-SHARE infrastructure, in addition to Simple4All project specific dissemination channels.

  • Simple4All intends to participate in major META-NET events like META-FORUM 2012.

 

Signed on behalf of Simple4All

Signed on behalf of META-NET

Simon King

Coordinator of Simple4All

 

Hans Uszkoreit

Coordinator of META-NET