================================================================ 08/15/01 to 10/31/02: Our contributions in the fourth year of this project primarily impact the fields of speech recognition, human language technology, and digital signal processing. Our major accomplishments are as follows: - Foundation Class Enhancements: -> released a comprehensive set of classes that implement many speech recognition functions, including Hidden Markov Models, Viterbi search, maximum likelihood parameter estimation. - Production System Release: -> released a fully-functional speech recognition system that includes several novel features: o generalized hierarchical decoder o generalization of cross-word decoding at any level of the hierarchy o network training that alleviates the need for intermediate phonetic transcriptions. We believe this system is the most flexible recognition system publicly available. - Hosted two workshops: -> a software design review held in January 2002 that included a one-day training session -> a one-week training workshop held in May 2002 that included 18 participants representing 10 universities and 5 companies. 10 participants were graduate students. - On-Line Support: -> our average number of serious support requests stabilized at approximately three requests per day. Most of these were provided with same day turnaround. Our user group has to almost 200 participants. ================================================================ 08/15/00 to 08/14/01: Our contributions in the third year of this project primarily impact the fields of speech recognition, human language technology, and digital signal processing. Our major accomplishments are as follows: - Java Applets: -> enhanced our job submission applet to use new Java servlet technology. Added applications that perform feature analysis and speech recognition decoding. - Foundation Class Enhancements: -> released a major overhaul of the system that makes more extensive use of templates and templatized functions; significantly impacted code size and run-time efficiency. -> released a new version of our application building tool that makes building acoustic front ends very simple and intuitive. - Production System Release: -> two alpha releases of a new version of the production speech recognition system based on our modular libraries. - Hosted two workshops: -> a software design review held in January 2001 that included a one-day training session -> a one-week training workshop held in May 2001 that included 24 participants representing 12 universities and 10 companies. 12 participants were graduate students. - Software engineering: -> overhauled our software engineering process to make better use of problem-tracking and configuration management. - On-Line Support: -> we are averaging approximately 5 serious support requests per day, and support a user group that has grown to over 170 participants. Recent enhancements to our process have allowed us to significantly streamline the software support process. ================================================================ 08/15/99 to 08/14/00: Our contributions in the second year of this project primarily impact the fields of speech recognition, human language technology, and digital signal processing. Our major accomplishments are as follows: - Production System Release: -> first release of the production speech recognition based on our modular libraries is scheduled for July 1. - Hosted two workshops: -> a software design review held in January 2000 that included a one-day training session -> a one-week training workshop to be held in May 2000 that will include 25 participants representing 6 countries, 17 universities, one government agency and one company. Twenty of the participants are graduate students. - Software engineering: -> added an automated report tracking system to our on-line support -> upgraded our distribution to use the autoconf facility: a standard way of distribution Unix software in which the distribution automatically configures itself. -> enhanced our ability to do multi-platform testing (we now benchmark our releases on Sun Sparc, Sun Solaris x86, Linux, and Windows before making a release), and bug detection (we make extensive use of professional strength debugging tools). - Foundation classes: -> refined the existing core mathematics classes -> added data structures, algorithms, and other signal processing building blocks. -> introduced classes to handle acoustic models, search algorithms, and knowledge sources. -> released a production front-end that allows arbitrary algorithms to be implemented using a graphical user interface - Java Applets: -> enhanced our pattern recognition applet with several important new features, including generation of arbitrary data sets, clustering, and visualization of decision surfaces. - On-Line Support: -> we are averaging approximately 5 serious support requests per day, and support a user group that has grown to over 170 participants. Support is definitely becoming a time-consuming issue. ================================================================ 08/15/98 to 08/14/99: Our contributions in the first year of this project primarily impact the fields of speech recognition, human language technology, and digital signal processing. Our major accomplishments are as follows: - Development of ISIP's Foundation Classes (IFCs) - Creation of a Comprehensive Web Site - Java Applets - Remote Job Submission Facility - Human Resources and Outreach These are described in detail in various sections below. - Development of ISIP's Foundation Classes (IFCs) The foundation classes include general mathematics (scalars, vectors, matrices), data structures (linked lists, binary trees) and other useful abstractions (command line parsing, database management). We have completed implementation of the math classes. The abstractions we use for these build upon ideas promoted in the ANSI C++ standard template library, but also add important features required for speech recognition research and technology development, such as explicit control of the data size of an integral type. Several interesting software engineering practices were implemented, including internal diagnostics that automatically test a class. For example, by simply typing 'make diagnose', a test program is generated for a class, which can be run, debugged, checked for memory leaks, etc. This is proving to be an invaluable tool for guaranteeing the quality of the code. - Creation of a Comprehensive Web Site The entire project can be viewed from a web site created to support this project. The URL is: http://www.isip.msstate.edu/projects/speech This site includes a place to download software, educational information such as tutorials, applets, technical reports, application toolkits, some Java applets demonstrating core concepts, and a remote job submission facility described below. We have implemented a facility to manage and distribute our software using a package called Concurrent Versions System (CVS). This allows users to download our production code via an anonymous CVS server (similar to ftp) that automatically updates their code as revisions are made. CVS is generally considered to be state-of-the-art in software management. We have also implemented web pages that maintain an archive of our mailing lists used for the project. These archives are located at http://www.isip.msstate.edu/data/mailing_lists and are automatically updated daily.