QCRI ties up with leading German laboratory

Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and European Media Laboratory (EML) in Heidelberg, Germany, have combined efforts to advance “very large vocabulary speech recognition technology” and systems for Arabic and develop an automatic Arabic language transcription system.“The collaboration between QCRI  and EML will rapidly progress the development of high performance Arabic language components on the EML Transcription Platform which would ultimately provide a rich source for Arabic language data collection to further enhance QCRI’s speech recognition models,” a press release said yesterday.QCRI is an initiative of Qatar Foundation. The applications for automatic language transcription are wide-ranging, it said. Video and audio content, from broadcast news programmes to lectures and meetings will become searchable, enabling knowledge sharing. It benefits persons who are hearing impaired, and may allow for the alternative communication of messages in noisy environments such as airports, or quiet areas such as libraries.  Dr Ahmed Elmagarmid, executive director of QCRI, said: “Our collaboration with EML is an ideal union of expertise in language technology research. The result of our co-operation opens up numerous possibilities for the future of communication enabling and information sharing. We look forward to further strengthening our relationship with EML.”“We are excited about the collaboration with QCRI for two reasons: First, it gets us into contact with a world-class research organisation, especially in the area of language-oriented technologies, and second, we can add another extremely important language to our portfolio,” said professor Andreas Reuter, CEO of EML. EML’s research and development expertise lies with speech processing technologies. It builds automatic speech transcription systems for speech messaging, speech analytics, and media transcription solutions.   EML has developed the EML Transcription Platform, a scalable speech recognition platform that is language independent.The goal of QCRI’s Arabic language technologies team is to develop a system which helps to break down language barriers to improve access to information and the ability to communicate.The team is undertaking major research efforts to improve machine translation and speech recognition for the Arabic language and its dialects through building language models for different domains, or uses, such as meetings, broadcast news or lectures.