Mylly - The Mill : A new platform for processing speech and text corpora easily and efficiently

Speech and language researchers need to manage and analyze increasing quantities of material. Various tools are available for various stages of the work, but they often require the researcher to use different interfaces and to convert the output from each tool into suitable input for the next one. The Language Bank of Finland (Kielipankki) is developing an on-line platform called Mylly for processing speech and language data in a graphical user interface that integrates different tools into a single workflow. Mylly provides tools and computational resources for processing material and for the inspecting the results. The tools plugged into Mylly include a parser, morphological analyzers, generic finite-state technology, and a speech recognizer. Users can upload data and download any intermediate results in the tool chain. Mylly runs on CSC’s Taito cluster and is an instance of the Chipster platform. Access rights to Mylly are given for academic use. The Language Bank of Finland is a collection of corpora, tools and other services maintained by FIN-CLARIN, a consortium of Finnish universities and research organizations coordinated by the University of Helsinki. The technological infrastructure for the Language Bank of Finland is provided by CSC – IT Center for Science.Peer reviewe

FINNISH SOUND STRUCTURE. PHONETICS, PHONOLOGY, PHONOTACTICS AND PROSODY

Suomi, Kari; Toivanen, Juhani & Ylitalo, Riikka. Studia humaniora ouluensia 9. Oulu: Oulun yliopisto 2008, 149 s.Elektroninen versio:http://herkules.oulu.fi/isbn978951428984

Mylly – The Mill : A platform for processing and analyzing your language data

Non peer reviewe

Comparing pitch distributions using Praat and R

Pitch analysis tools are used widely in order to measure and to visualize the melodic aspects of speech. The resulting pitch contours can serve various research interests linked with speech prosody, such as intonational phonology, interaction in conversation, emotion analysis, language learning and singing. Due to physiological differences and individual habits, speakers tend to differ in their typical pitch ranges. As a consequence, pitch analysis results are not always easy to interpret and to compare among speakers. In this study, we use the Praat program (Boersma & Weenink 2015) for analyzing pitch in samples of conversational Finnish speech and we use the R statistical programming environment (R Core Team, 2014) for further analysis and visualization. We first describe the general shapes of the speaker-specific pitch distributions and see whether and how the distributions vary between individuals. A bootstrapping method is applied to discover the minimal amount of speech that is necessary in order to reliably determine the pitch mean, median and mode for an individual speaker. The scripts and code written for the Praat program and for the R statistical programming environment are made available under an open license for experimenting with other speech samples. The datasets produced with the Praat script will also be made available for further studies.Peer reviewe

Perustaajuusjakaumien vertaileminen Praatilla ja R:llä

Pitch analysis tools are used widely in order to measure and to visualize the melodic aspects of speech. The resulting pitch contours can serve various research interests linked with speech prosody, such as intonational phonology, interaction in conversation, emotion analysis, language learning and singing. Due to physiological differences and individual habits, speakers tend to differ in their typical pitch ranges. As a consequence, pitch analysis results are not always easy to interpret and to compare among speakers. In this study, we use the Praat program (Boersma & Weenink 2015) for analyzing pitch in samples of conversational Finnish speech and we use the R statistical programming environment (R Core Team, 2014) for further analysis and visualization. We first describe the general shapes of the speaker-specific pitch distributions and see whether and how the distributions vary between individuals. A bootstrapping method is applied to discover the minimal amount of speech that is necessary in order to reliably determine the pitch mean, median and mode for an individual speaker. The scripts and code written for the Praat program and for the R statistical programming environment are made available under an open license for experimenting with other speech samples. The datasets produced with the Praat script will also be made available for further studies.Peer reviewe