December 2015

KTH Speech, Music and Hearing

KTH Royal Institute of Technology – delivers one third of Sweden’s capacity of technical research and higher education. The education covers a wide area, from science and technology to architecture, industrial economy, societal planning, philosophy and language.

The Department of Speech, Music and Hearing was founded in 1951 by one of the great pioneers in phonetics and spoken communication – Gunnar Fant. It was called the speech transmission laboratory in those days. The original research focus of the department has remained the same, but its name has varied over the years. 2016 we celebrate 65 years of unbroken research on communication between people and between people and machines, making us one of the very oldest departments of its kind.

KTH Speech, Music and Hearing has participated in a number of large collections of Swedish speech resources, such as the EU funded SpeeCOM and SpeechDAT and the Swedish Science Foundation funded Spontal. We have a special focus on conversation and everyday speech, and have developed a number of methods for the analysis and labelling of that particular type of data.

David House

Jens Edlund

Within Swe-Clarin, David House and Jens Edlund are our key staff. We share a background in linguistics and phonetics, David in Lund and Jens at Stockholm University, but we have both worked with speech and conversations at KTH since the last millennium.

KTHs role in Swe-Clarin is that of a K-Center (Knowledge centre). This means that people can contact us for information and advice on speech data and its use. We have, as the first group in Sweden, applied for certification as a K-Centre and count on achieving that status by the turn of 2015, under the title CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Speech Analysis (CLARIN-SPEECH).

On November 16th, the Group for Speech within Swe-Clarin - KTH, DIGISAM and Språkrådet/ISOF, held the workshop Swe-Clarin and the spoken language I – Research collaborations between resource holders, speech technologists, and researchers within the human and social sciences. The workshop aimed to put resource holders, speech (or language) technologists, and researchers together to discuss possible collaborations based in the needs of the researchers, the contents and characteristics of the resources, and the possibilities provided by technology.

The workshop was quite successful with over thirty participants. The discussions of the afternoon will be summarized in a smaller number of example cases in miniature format, which will make up the basis for the catalogue of research examples that the group will develop within Swe-Clarin. Several of the project ideas have led to further collaborations, and we count at least one larger project proposal and a conference presentation to the direct outcomes of the workshop. The day ended with snacks and refreshments in KTH’s facilities.

Swe-Clarin’s first year has come to an end

2015 is coming to an end and we are summarizing our first project year for Swe-Clarin that started with a kick-off held in Gothenburg in February. There we decided to hold one consortium meeting and two virtual meetings per 6 months. During 2015 we arranged virtual meetings in April, June, September and December as well as one consortium meeting in November. During the kick-off we also decided to arrange a workshop in conjunction with our consortium meetings and this year we held Swe-Clarin and the spoken language I that is presented in this newsletter. In addition, we arranged workshops together with the National Library (KB) in Stockholm and SweClarin’s first DH-workshop in Gothenburg. The latter was presented in the newsletter published in April.

During next year the Swe-Clarin adventure will continue and we will arrange the first virtual meeting in February. A preliminary date for our consortium meeting is set to April 4-5 in Uppsala. During the fall we will have an official kick-off meeting for Swe-Clarin’s web services in Gothenburg and present a first version of our tool box. The kick-off is open to the public and invites anyone interested in our work to participate. The Swe-Clarin steering committee is now set and the committee consists of 8 members representing digital humanities and social sciences in Sweden. We will present the members of the committee in a newsletter during the spring.

To better reach out to our intended users, we plan a series of workshops during 2016 where we travel to different universities around Sweden and present previously unexplored materials. We will use the corpus tool Korp and possibly other tools available within Swe-Clarin and guide researchers that are interested. An invitation with dates and places will be sent out in 2016. If you want to host such an event, please let us know!

We wish You all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Hope to see you again in 2016!

Calendar
February: virtual meeting for the Swe-Clarin members
14–15 Mars: NCN workshop in Oslo about Big language data
15–17 Mars: DHN Conference in Oslo
4–5 April: Consortium meeting in Uppsala Autumn: Kick-off in Gothenburg

Future News
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