Isin Demirsahin

Also published as: Isin Demirşahin, Işin Demirşahin


2022

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Criteria for Useful Automatic Romanization in South Asian Languages
Isin Demirsahin | Cibu Johny | Alexander Gutkin | Brian Roark
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper presents a number of possible criteria for systems that transliterate South Asian languages from their native scripts into the Latin script, a process known as romanization. These criteria are related to either fidelity to human linguistic behavior (pronunciation transparency, naturalness and conventionality) or processing utility for people (ease of input) as well as under-the-hood in systems (invertibility and stability across languages and scripts). When addressing these differing criteria several linguistic considerations, such as modeling of prominent phonological processes and their relation to orthography, need to be taken into account. We discuss these key linguistic details in the context of Brahmic scripts and languages that use them, such as Hindi and Malayalam. We then present the core features of several romanization algorithms, implemented in a finite state transducer (FST) formalism, that address differing criteria. Implementations of these algorithms have been released as part of the Nisaba finite-state script processing library.

2020

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Processing South Asian Languages Written in the Latin Script: the Dakshina Dataset
Brian Roark | Lawrence Wolf-Sonkin | Christo Kirov | Sabrina J. Mielke | Cibu Johny | Isin Demirsahin | Keith Hall
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper describes the Dakshina dataset, a new resource consisting of text in both the Latin and native scripts for 12 South Asian languages. The dataset includes, for each language: 1) native script Wikipedia text; 2) a romanization lexicon; and 3) full sentence parallel data in both a native script of the language and the basic Latin alphabet. We document the methods used for preparation and selection of the Wikipedia text in each language; collection of attested romanizations for sampled lexicons; and manual romanization of held-out sentences from the native script collections. We additionally provide baseline results on several tasks made possible by the dataset, including single word transliteration, full sentence transliteration, and language modeling of native script and romanized text.

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Open-source Multi-speaker Speech Corpora for Building Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu Speech Synthesis Systems
Fei He | Shan-Hui Cathy Chu | Oddur Kjartansson | Clara Rivera | Anna Katanova | Alexander Gutkin | Isin Demirsahin | Cibu Johny | Martin Jansche | Supheakmungkol Sarin | Knot Pipatsrisawat
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We present free high quality multi-speaker speech corpora for Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu, which are six of the twenty two official languages of India spoken by 374 million native speakers. The datasets are primarily intended for use in text-to-speech (TTS) applications, such as constructing multilingual voices or being used for speaker or language adaptation. Most of the corpora (apart from Marathi, which is a female-only database) consist of at least 2,000 recorded lines from female and male native speakers of the language. We present the methodological details behind corpora acquisition, which can be scaled to acquiring data for other languages of interest. We describe the experiments in building a multilingual text-to-speech model that is constructed by combining our corpora. Our results indicate that using these corpora results in good quality voices, with Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) > 3.6, for all the languages tested. We believe that these resources, released with an open-source license, and the described methodology will help in the progress of speech applications for the languages described and aid corpora development for other, smaller, languages of India and beyond.

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Crowdsourcing Latin American Spanish for Low-Resource Text-to-Speech
Adriana Guevara-Rukoz | Isin Demirsahin | Fei He | Shan-Hui Cathy Chu | Supheakmungkol Sarin | Knot Pipatsrisawat | Alexander Gutkin | Alena Butryna | Oddur Kjartansson
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

In this paper we present a multidialectal corpus approach for building a text-to-speech voice for a new dialect in a language with existing resources, focusing on various South American dialects of Spanish. We first present public speech datasets for Argentinian, Chilean, Colombian, Peruvian, Puerto Rican and Venezuelan Spanish specifically constructed with text-to-speech applications in mind using crowd-sourcing. We then compare the monodialectal voices built with minimal data to a multidialectal model built by pooling all the resources from all dialects. Our results show that the multidialectal model outperforms the monodialectal baseline models. We also experiment with a “zero-resource” dialect scenario where we build a multidialectal voice for a dialect while holding out target dialect recordings from the training data.

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Open-source Multi-speaker Corpora of the English Accents in the British Isles
Isin Demirsahin | Oddur Kjartansson | Alexander Gutkin | Clara Rivera
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper presents a dataset of transcribed high-quality audio of English sentences recorded by volunteers speaking with different accents of the British Isles. The dataset is intended for linguistic analysis as well as use for speech technologies. The recording scripts were curated specifically for accent elicitation, covering a variety of phonological phenomena and providing a high phoneme coverage. The scripts include pronunciations of global locations, major airlines and common personal names in different accents; and native speaker pronunciations of local words. Overlapping lines for all speakers were included for idiolect elicitation, which include the same or similar lines with other existing resources such as the CSTR VCTK corpus and the Speech Accent Archive to allow for easy comparison of personal and regional accents. The resulting corpora include over 31 hours of recordings from 120 volunteers who self-identify as native speakers of Southern England, Midlands, Northern England, Welsh, Scottish and Irish varieties of English.

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Open-Source High Quality Speech Datasets for Basque, Catalan and Galician
Oddur Kjartansson | Alexander Gutkin | Alena Butryna | Isin Demirsahin | Clara Rivera
Proceedings of the 1st Joint Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (CCURL)

This paper introduces new open speech datasets for three of the languages of Spain: Basque, Catalan and Galician. Catalan is furthermore the official language of the Principality of Andorra. The datasets consist of high-quality multi-speaker recordings of the three languages along with the associated transcriptions. The resulting corpora include over 33 hours of crowd-sourced recordings of 132 male and female native speakers. The recording scripts also include material for elicitation of global and local place names, personal and business names. The datasets are released under a permissive license and are available for free download for commercial, academic and personal use. The high-quality annotated speech datasets described in this paper can be used to, among other things, build text-to-speech systems, serve as adaptation data in automatic speech recognition and provide useful phonetic and phonological insights in corpus linguistics.

2019

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A Syntactically Expressive Morphological Analyzer for Turkish
Adnan Ozturel | Tolga Kayadelen | Isin Demirsahin
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing

We present a broad coverage model of Turkish morphology and an open-source morphological analyzer that implements it. The model captures intricacies of Turkish morphology-syntax interface, thus could be used as a baseline that guides language model development. It introduces a novel fine part-of-speech tagset, a fine-grained affix inventory and represents morphotactics without zero-derivations. The morphological analyzer is freely available. It consists of modular reusable components of human-annotated gold standard lexicons, implements Turkish morphotactics as finite-state transducers using OpenFst and morphophonemic processes as Thrax grammars.

2014

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Annotating Discourse Connectives in Spoken Turkish
Isin Demirşahin | Deniz Zeyrek
Proceedings of LAW VIII - The 8th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

2013

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Applicative Structures and Immediate Discourse in the Turkish Discourse Bank
Isin Demirşahin | Adnan Öztürel | Cem Bozşahin | Deniz Zeyrek
Proceedings of the 7th Linguistic Annotation Workshop and Interoperability with Discourse

2012

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Discourse Structure in Simultaneous Spoken Turkish
Isin Demirşahin
Proceedings of ACL 2012 Student Research Workshop

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Pair Annotation: Adaption of Pair Programming to Corpus Annotation
Isin Demirşahin | İhsan Yalcinkaya | Deniz Zeyrek
Proceedings of the Sixth Linguistic Annotation Workshop

2010

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The Annotation Scheme of the Turkish Discourse Bank and an Evaluation of Inconsistent Annotations
Deniz Zeyrek | Işin Demirşahin | Ayişiği Sevdik-Çalli | Hale Ögel Balaban | İhsan Yalçinkaya | Ümit Deniz Turan
Proceedings of the Fourth Linguistic Annotation Workshop

2009

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Annotating Subordinators in the Turkish Discourse Bank
Deniz Zeyrek | Umit Deniz Turan | Cem Bozsahin | Ruket Cakici | Ayisigi B. Sevdik-Calli | Isin Demirsahin | Berfin Aktas | İhsan Yalcinkaya | Hale Ogel
Proceedings of the Third Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW III)