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that can be used by external developers. With limited resources of time, money and
labour, every administrative chore added to the workflow reduces resources available
for more delivery-oriented tasks.
The first decision to the problem of ‘chores’ was that the solution should be a
Speech Processing Resource in its own right. The solution should consist of a set of
reusable, extensible, shareable tools to be made available to (a) ourselves on future
projects, and (b) other teams working on speech processing projects around the
world.
2.1 Requirements
The main design goals of our solution are as follows:
• researchers should be able to work independently of data format
restrictions;
• necessary, complicated, but uninteresting tasks should be automated;
• interesting, but complicated tasks should be made simple;
• researchers should be able to address linguistic problems with linguistic
solutions;
• the toolkit should be increasingly simple to maintain and develop; and,
• the toolkit should encourage its own use and development.
• Researchers should be able to work independently of data format
restrictions.
Data can be collected, transcribed and stored in a range of formats. Each of the
range of available tools for language technology research accepts or generates data
in its own format, or in a limited range of standard formats. Researchers should not
have to worry about which format works with which application: they should be able
to pick the application necessary (or preferred) for the research problem, and the
data should be readily accessible in the correct format.
• Necessary, complicated, but uninteresting tasks should be automated.
This applies to life in general, of course.
• Interesting but complicated tasks should be made uncomplicated.
Due to the nature of the field, where it is often necessary to process large sets of
data, many of the more interesting problems (e.g. building AMs for speech recognition)
involve procedures that are repetitive (e.g. those that have to be applied to every
item in a corpus) or complicated (e.g. initialising a system). Researchers learning
about a new area are hampered when these tasks dominate learning time.
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