FRENCH (France, Belgium, Switzerland)

Existing databases and their actors

• Fundamental research

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  National initiatives produced basic/advanced material (BDSONS, BREF, BDBRUIT, ICY, SPOT)

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  EEC actions produced basic (EUROM-0, EUROM-1, POLYGLOT), specific (ACCOR) material.

• Application-oriented: There are indices of cooperation between academics (PSH/DISPE) and industry with the sponsorship of EEC (FREETEL, SPELL).
• telephone / Telecom: Speaker verification corpus (Switzerland)
• Lexicon: BDLEX

Ongoing projects & new initiatives

French is represented in the main European (and worldwide) current initiatives such as COCOSDA, EAGLES, EUROCOCOSDA, RELATOR, SQALE, ONOMASTICA, FREETEL and (through Switzerland) POLYPHONE, TED-Martigny. Some of these initiatives deal with linguistic resource standardisation, dissemination and production. The very next resources to be produced in French will be under the sponsorship of

• the French-speaking network: FRANCIL (Réseau Francophone de l'Ingénierie de la Langue): speech synthesis, vocal dictation, person-machine dialogue
• EEC: POLYPHONE type French corpus by Philips (SPEECHDAT), timetable enquires over the telephone (RAILTEL).

Conclusion

• Situation
  The French speech community is quite active. All types of actors are present with many universities, academic institutions, and both public and private research laboratories are involved in national and EEC projects, in France but also in Switzerland and Belgium. The recent creation of FRANCIL demonstrates this activity. Major telephone, telecom companies operate in the field and the many companies demonstrate the interest in speech technology.
• Needs

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  telephone databases (SPEECHDAT)

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  application-ready corpora (over-the-phone, spontaneous, different conditions, etc.)

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  advanced corpora (dialogue, dictation) (Aupelf)

• Dissemination
  There are some attempt at making databases available on the market as commercial products, by the producer itself or through a licensed company. Most of the resources produced by academics are available free to other academics but distribution to industrials is still a problem and, when possible, is carried out on a case-by-case basis. As most academics have no way to handle properly commercial issues, the French organisation GRD-PRC is very interested in setting up a national repository that would take care of the dissemination of both written and spoken language resources. There is a strong desire for a European center for resource distribution, that would take care of issues such as IPR and licensing agreements.