User:Ar rahul/GSoC2013/

= Developing Acoustic and Language Model for Malayalam Recognition =

Personal Information

 * 1) Name : A.R.Rahul
 * 2) Email Address : 2ar.rahul@gmail.com
 * 3) Telephone : +919446048820
 * 4) University and Education : BTech in Computer Science, College of Engineering Trivandrum ( University of Kerala )

Mailing Address : Arackal Thirunelliyoor Lane, Pallimukku Peyad P.O Thiruvananathapuram - 695573 Kerala

My name is A.R.Rahul. I hail from Kerala one of the beautiful southern state in India widely called as 'God's Own Country'. I am 22 years old and i major in computer science. I am passionate about science and technology and i am a free software enthusiast.

Why do you want to work with the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing ?
I think most of the technological advancements in the field of computer science is inaccessible to the majority of general public due to lack of local language support .SMC, with its slogan "എന്റെ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറിനു് എന്റെ ഭാഷ " (my language for my computer), has always been in the forefront working for the same.Malyalam being my mother tongue i believe i can contribute to the SMC community.

Do you have any past involvement with the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing or another open source project as a contributor?
I have participated in a localisation camp organised by SMC. Other than that i have also actively participated in developing a GNU/Linux distribution, based on debian , aimed at students of technical courses (www.rithos.org).

Did you participate with the past GSoC programs, if so which years, which organizations?
No. I’am applying GSOC for the first time.

Do you have other obligations between May and August ?
No. I am confident that i can finish this project in time. I can devote 40hrs a week for this project.

Will you continue contributing/ supporting the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing after the GSoC 2013 program, if yes, which area(s), you are interested in?
Yes. Speech Recognition and Artificial Intelligence is my area of interest. The scope of this project is much beyond a single SoC. My dream is to improve speech recognition engine currently available for malayalam to a level better or at least on par with English language.

Why should we choose you over other applicants?
For the past four months i have been working on a project that involved modeling a closed vocabulary acoustic model in malayalam. I have good experience working with the sphinx engine which is the speech recognition system that i am going to use in creating acoustic and language model. I have experience using sphinxtrain and cmuclmtk which are used to train acoustic model and language model respectively.I also have experience writing python scripts for automating creation of database description files such as dictionary, transcription etc. With the experience that I have I am confident of creating an acoustic model and language model for malayalam language with acceptable WER(word error rates) in time.

Synopsis
The project aims at building an Acoustic model and Language Model for Malayalam language, which will be very useful for research and development purposes in Malayalam Speech Recognition and Processing area.

project proposal
CMU Sphinx is an open source toolkit for speech recognition developed by carnegie mellon university.It contains series of speech recognizers of which latest is sphinx4, acoustic model trainer (sphinx train) and a statsitical language model builder (cmuclmtk). For developing a continous speech recognition system we need well trained acoustic model and language model.An acousitc model process audio recordings with their transcriptions and form statstical representations of word. A language model describes the likelihood, probability, or penalty taken when a sequence or collection of words is seen.

CMUSphinx project comes with several high-quality acoustic models and language model for language like english, french, spanish etc.

The aim of this project as a whole is to develop a high-quality acoustic model and language model for malayalam.

The initial goal of the project is creating the database required which involves :
 * Collecting voice data and making transcription for acoustic model
 * Collecting text corpora for language model

Once the database is formed we can start training the acoustic model using sphinxtrain and build language model using cmuclmtk. Although we have not applied any optimisation at this stage of the project we will have successfully created a working acoustic and language model.

Optimisations, careful selection of voice and text data that can better represent the language , can be performed at this stage/phase so that quality of the acoustic model and language model created can be improved.


 * Grapheme to phoneme converters and optimal text selection algorithm can be used to select a set phonetically rich sentences from a huge text corpus.


 * Appropriate speaker selection and using data statistics can greatly improve the quality of collected acoustic data.

Technical Skills

 * 1) Languages : C,C++,Python,Java,Bash
 * 2) Software Packages : GDB, Emacs , Eclipse
 * 3) Embedded Platforms : Arduino, Atmel AVR , SiliconLabs CIP-

Free Software
I am passionate about technology and free and open source systems. I am actively involved in the free software community and have volunteered for various free/open projects in the past. I have participated in various national level conferences ( like FOSS.IN, Pycon India ) that promote FOSS.

Developer Experience

 * Intern as Linux Distribution Developer [ Winter 2010 ]
 * Zyxware Technologies,
 * KD Road,Marappalam Pattom P.O ,Trivandrum
 * Developed a Linux Distribution aimed at technical courses . ( http://www.rithuos.org )


 * Jukebox Software [ June 2011 ]
 * Project involve development of java based user-friendly application software designed to operate a partially automated music-playing device that will play a patron's selection from self-contained media.


 * Automation of Equitorial paltform of a telescope [ January 2012 ]
 * Project involve development of a hardware to automate the movement of euatorial platform of a telescope. Chip used was atmega16. Programming was done using micro-c.


 * Linux From Scratch [June 2013 ]
 * Build a compact Linux system entirely from source code to understand the internal working of a Linux distribution system.


 * Swaram-Malayalam Speech Recognition System [Jan - June 2013]
 * Swaram is a free software initiative aimed towards recognising malayalam  speech. The initial goal of the  project was to extend the language support of CMU Sphinx engine and use it to recognise malayalam.
 * Link : https://github.com/jerrin001/swaram.git

Unavailable - May 6th to June 2nd
University tests and other academic responsibilities.

June 2nd - June 15th
I am familiar with the usage of sphinxtrain and cmuclmtk so i will be using this time to understand and learn to configure the internal parameters of the sphinx engine to improve performance of models formed.

June 15th - June 30
During this period i will be collecting all the voice data and text corpora required for the acoustic model and language model respectively.

July 1st - July 15th
Training the initial acoustic model and building the language model.

July 16th - July 28th
Handling any unexpected issues regarding the data collected and finally retraining the models.

Midterm Evaluation
Mid-Term should provide the community with a reasonably good acoustic model and language model for Malayalam.

August
Applying optimisations including graphemes to phoneme conversion and optimal text selection algorithms for text corpora. Choosing appropriate speakers based on data statistics is also done during this period. Finally training of the optimised data to form the high quality acoustic model and language model.

September 1st- September 15th
Can be used for general bug fixing and detailed documentation.

Final Evaluation
Expects to complete a high quality acoustic model and language model for malayalam with low WER(word error rate).

Pens Down
Improve Documentation and Final Touchups

Mentor
My proposal is based on my discussion with Deepa P Gopinath, SMC mentor. I have discussed and understood the various challenges i might face during this project and i am confident enough to complete this project in time under her mentoring.