PR: ELRA signed its first Language Resources distribution agreement for Sign Language processing with the University of West Bohemia

[Helene Mazo]

[Our apologies if you have received multiple copies of this announcement]
//

/Press Release - Immediate //Paris//, //France//, November//, 18^th 2008///

*Distribution Agreement*

/ELRA signed its first Language Resources distribution agreement for 
Sign Language processing with the //University of West Bohemia./

ELRA and the University of West Bohemia (Department of Cybernetics) 
signed a Language Resources distribution agreement to announce the first 
sign-language databases made available in the ELRA catalogue.
On behalf of ELRA, ELDA will act as the distribution agency for the 
University of West Bohemia, by incorporating to the ELRA Language 
Resources catalogue four audio-visual speech databases designed and
collected for the training and testing of Czech audio-visual continuous 
speech recognition systems. The resources were built on covering the 
Czech sign-language, including one resource aiming to
be used for training lip-/head-tracking systems under various 
illumination conditions independently of the language.

State-of-the-art R&D work is currently taking place at the University of 
West Bohemia in areas such as audio-visual speech recognition, 
audi-visual speech synthesis, sign-language translation and sign-language
synthesis, with efforts devoted to the deaf community.

With these resources, ELRA is willing to extend the current catalogue, 
by offering a new type of resources: audio-visual resources for 
sign-language. With this agreement, the Department of Cybernetics will 
contribute
further to the research and technology progress on audio-visual speech 
recognition systems.

List of Resources:

ELRA-S0283 Laboratory Conditions Czech Audio-Visual Speech Corpus 
(UWB-05-LCAVC) <http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1081>
ELRA-S0284 Czech Audio-Visual Speech Corpus for Recognition with 
Impaired Conditions (UWB-07-ICAVR I) 
<http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1082>
ELRA-S0285 Czech Sign Language Corpus for Recognition – Amateur Signer 
(UWB-06-SLR-A) <http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1083>
ELRA-S0286 Czech Sign Language Corpus for Recognition – Professional 
Signer (UWB-07-SLR-P) 
<http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1084>
<http://catalog.elra.info/search_result.php?keywords=w0045>

For more information on the ELRA catalogue, please contact:

Valérie Mapelli, mapelli at elda.org <mailto:mapelli at elda.org>

For more information on ELRA & ELDA, please contact:

Khalid Choukri, choukri at elda.org <mailto:choukri at elda.org>
Hélène Mazo, mazo at elda.org <mailto:mazo at elda.org>

<mailto:mazo at elda.org>

ELDA
55-57, rue Brillat Savarin
75013 Paris (France)

Tel.: +33 1 43 13 33 33
Fax: +33 1 43 13 33 30


*** About ELRA ***
The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit 
making organisation founded by the European Commission in 1995, with the 
mission of providing a clearing house
for language resources and promoting Human Language Technologies (HLT).

To find out more about ELRA, please visit our web site: www.elra.info 
<http://www.elra.info/>

*** About ELDA ***
The Evaluation and Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) is ELRA 
operational body. ELDA identifies, collects, markets, and distributes 
language resources, along with the dissemination
of general information in the field of HLT. ELDA also participates in 
some evaluation projects and campaigns, has considerable knowledge and 
skills in HLT applications and has participated in many
French, European and international projects.

To find out more about ELDA, please visit our web site: www.elda.org 
<http://www.elda.org/>

*** About the Department of Cybernetics, University of West Bohemia ***
The aim of the Department of Cybernetics' research activity is the 
building and development of systems theory and its application in the 
area of objectively and subjectively uncertain systems as well
as in the planning of information and control systems. The basic 
activity of artificial intelligence is the research into sophisticated 
computer algorithms and methods of intelligent machine decision-making
and classification. The reseach is mostly focused on the area of 
man-machine voice communication in natural language - automatic speech 
recognition (ASR).

To find out more about the Department of Cybernetics, at the University 
of West Bohemia, please visit our web site: http://www.kky.zcu.cz/en