We were pleased to be a part of the IceTAL 2010 conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, where we presented our work on ROILA. The published version of the paper is now available in the publications section. Needless to say we also had great fun exploring Reykjavik and the natural beauty of Iceland (see pictures below of the Church of Hallgrímur, the Gullfoss Waterfall and the Strokkur Geysir).
Tags: Iceland, IceTAL 2010, Reykjavik
We have received several queries/comments on some important words that are missing in the initial ROILA vocabulary. For e.g. there is no word for robot. We have apple, but no eat. We have shirt, but no pants, and no wear. By using Basic English and its 850 or so constituent words as the vocabulary we are obviously constrained by our design decision. Fortunately, ROILA words are generated automatically by a genetic algorithm, therefore to extend the vocabulary is only a matter of rerunning the algorithm with slightly modified parameters so that the algorithm takes into account the existing vocabulary and does not discard it completely.
Consequently we see the following approach can solve the problem of certain missing words:
We re-run the genetic algorithm so that it generates a new vocabulary comprising of 100 “wild card” words besides the same original 850 ROILA words. ROILA users could then assign any meaning to any word from those 100 wild card words. Of course it can always be another number than 100, it could be more or less depending on the requirements. The genetic algorithm will be responsible of ensuring that the new vocabulary has words which are acoustically different from each other. We will be providing the list of 100 wild card ROILA words very soon.
Here is the list that we promised, 100 new ROILA words in no particular order: sisol, melowe, mowif, pawowu, foje, pepase, wojas, fosi, wobis, japaf, bofet, tenut, totab, lajak, nafose, kisofo, wabuk, powijo, nosil, bifut, jusefu, koset, mepof, mobali, tamis, juwisa, nafob, memab, jesen, sunob, sisot, fekef, loji, jesel, jitat, fibi, tunik, jetate, lumoj, nubuk, wutema, silif, wilaf, lulos, sekefa, kukip, kutil, tewajo, fesopi, fesamu, wujifi, bapan, bileki, nilin, malolu, patosi, koko, nokab, palana, samup, metin, jamena, wutose, winilo, nojoja, waboki, pajib, mibilu, soteju, pewepa, pupapo, metoja, tele, kewub, bowaj, limim, poban, kalalu, mapib, ponob, nefimu, baluw, nokej, nuketo, pike, tafoba, pakawe, tumib, pojos, nikabo, sopip, sesip, bulo, lapun, nelale, kabeta, fipos, pafes, mukeni, jekemi
Tags: new words, vocabulary
We are pleased to inform that Wetenschap 24 (a Dutch media company that reports on state of art scientific research) did a video interview and report on ROILA. Find the 3 minute clip below. The video was also broadcast on Nederland 2 (a local dutch channel) as part of the program Science Flash. The report (in dutch) can be found here.
Tags: interview, video, Wetenschap 24
It is interesting to observe how the media hype works. We originally gave a hint to one blog and from there on many blogs and news web sites took notice of our project. Within 2-3 days we received a massive number of visits, but as quickly as it started, it also faded. The traditional media is a bit slower and a television interview will be broadcast next Thursday.
Statistics of our website of the last days.
We are pleased to inform you that we have made some progress with getting Festival TTS going for ROILA. As always feedback and comments are welcome. Please note that this is still work in progress.
Here are the initial results (for sake of consistency, we provide audio files of sample sentences that are also discussed elsewhere)
fosit koloke
fosit nole
buse fosit
bama buse fosit
bobuja
fosit jimeja
fosit kipupi
fosit webufo
fosit besati
The output from text to speech was also passed to the Sphinx-4 speech recognizer and the recognition results were very good.
Several steps are required to accomplish TTS for ROILA and ultimately to get your audio files. We will post details very soon so that everyone can have their machines talk in ROILA!
Acknowledgement: We would like to thank Steve Pomeroy for providing a sample script of how to enable Festival to speak in artificial languages. We would also like to thank Alex Juarez for helping in running Festival on Linux.
Tags: festival, text to speech
Our project has a attracted a considerable media attention. Here is the coverage as far as we are aware of it.
August 3rd
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We would like to appreciate the considerable interest that has been generated recently for ROILA. We thank everyone for their comments, feedback and kind suggestions. We aim to get back to everyone as soon as possible and address the valuable points that have been raised with regards to the design of the ROILA language.
Currently we are working on the speech synthesis stage of our project. We aim to have a text to speech engine that can speak ROILA at will. For this purpose we are playing around with Festival, which is an open source tts engine. Festival also goes by its CMU name of Festvox. If you have any pointers (practical experience) about the following, please do contact us:
Moreover we have also found an online tool CMU Spice which provides a platform where new languages can be evaluated from both a speech recognition and a speech synthesis perspective. If you have had a successful experience with it, please do contact us as well.
Tags: cmu spice, festival, text to speech
We would like to appreciate the continued support of LEGO Mindstorms. They have donated 20 NXT kits and 1 cubic meter of LEGO Technic in support of the ROILA project. We aim to reward the children who will eventually learn ROILA with the NXT kits. Recently there was also a post about our project on the LEGO NXT Mindstorms blog and on Popular Science.
Tags: LEGO cooperation
We were pleased to present ROILA and its demo recently on two separate occassions. The first was on June 21, when an internationl review board visited our department of industrial design to evaluate the quality of research done here. As part of their visitation we had the honour of presenting ROILA and also gave a working demo about it. A similar demo was given on July 6 (see video below), when the staff of Philips Research Eindhoven visited our deparment as part of research collaboration activities.
Tags: demo, demonstration
