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researResearch
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Speech technologies : Voice synthesis
and spoken dialogue between Human
and Machine
Particularly active in the area of Voice synthesis,
more specifically with expressive Voice synthesis
(demonstrators of textual expressiveness which
extends the traditional corpus approach), with a
solid partnership with Orange Labs, Lannion,
SCRIPtureS also became interested in 2008, in
the question of spoken dialogue between Human
and Machine. The theme which interests us the
most is that of the evaluation of the systems of
such dialogues (this is the subject of a new
thesis). In fact, it seems very difficult to have an
evaluation grid which allows us to know whether
a human is satisfied or not after he or she has
had a totally automated exchange with a
machine. On the other hand, we realized, after a
state of the art review, that, in practical terms,
all the existing systems have the same
architecture, which is in fact serial. The current
systems hope, generally, to reap some benefits
from global progress through local progress
(typically speech recognition and synthesis
modules), which they organise around a dialogue
management module. Finally, we noticed that
there is no corpus to construct a system
following a corpus-based approach and real
corpus linguistics. The obstacles to be removed
seem to be connected with the underlying
paradigm of the dialogue design, and we have
chosen to develop, by extending that of vocal
synthesis which has already proven its worth, an
approach specifically by dialogue corpus. In 2008,
we carried out a case-by-case review of such
dialogue systems architectures and through our
analyses looked for the lineaments of an
interpretative evaluation approach (i.e. from the
reception point of view). This work also
culminated in a first methodology of corpus
collection and creation.
Four theses
Four theses were defended from the SCRIPtureS
project group in 2008. In January, Frédéric Miras
[5] defended an adaptive book model, which can
provide, through ICT, a set of mediation functions
between traditional reading practices and onscreen
reading practices. In June, Gábor Bélla [4]
defended an original vision of the question of
coding, which consisted in doping classic
UNICODE descriptions with a knowledge
representation layer ; he thus took digital
typography into an innovative space with an
extended adaptability to practice. In October,
Adrian Popescu [6] defended a vision of image
search from a big WEB corpus by suggesting
ways of semantic enrichment for search
requests ; his applications and demonstrators,
finally involved in the question of e-tourism,
were the basis for an ANR project which began
at the very end of 2008. Finally, in December,
Thomas Le Bras presented an interpretative
CEHL design ; his application area (History of Art
lessons) made the link between the reserach
questions of the virtual museum and those of e-
learning, which are a recurrent factor in the
SCRIPtureS project's interests.
Optimisation and watermarking of
two-dimensional barcodes
Alphacode is a young company who have
developed an innovative two-dimensional
barcode. Two-dimensional barcodes are used to
label very diverse objects, such as the wrappings
of luxury products or letters or medicine pills or
mechanical car-parts. The advantage of the
Alphacode code is that it is linear and based on
Unicode. It can thus encode textual chains of any
size, in all the world's writing systems. Such a
project experiences certain technical difficulties.
Within the framework of the OCCAM II
development project, we have worked on three
types of problem : (a) problems of file size : it is
difficult to use heavy fonts which are of several
méga-octets on a mobile telephone. We have
solved this problem by limiting the choice of
characters covered by the font, and by using
virtual glyphs obtained by composing real glyphs
; (b) problems of font quality : the quality must be
good enough to be read accurately by optical
readers. We have defined TrueType quality
optimisation adapted to the graphic structure of
Alphacode glyphs by placing the edge of the
pixels on the print or display grid; (c) finally,
security problems to protect against
counterfeiting. To do this, we have proposed the
insertion of a watermark based on the very
principle of Alphacode codes : thus we obtain a
«code within the code», only accessible to high