Welcome at the January 2020 PyData Meetup in Skopje. Giving the talk will be Branislav Gerazov, PhD, professor at FEIT, and generally cool guy.
Abstract of the talk: The annotation of intonation contours is a tedious task in which it is often hard to make precise classification of the contour type. This is due to the large level of acceptable variability in the melody whilst allowing for correct transfer of the intended linguistic and paralinguistic information, superimposed on the innate nonlinguistic variation. To ease the process, we designed a tool for interactive annotation in the form of a web application. The tool is based on an interactive plot of the intonation contours whose distribution is based on their similarity extracted with a variational autoencoder. The tool can be used to visually and acoustically inspect the contours and utterances, and for their classification. The whole system is realised in Python with the use of the Bokeh visualisation library (https://bokeh.org/) and the Django web framework (https://www.djangoproject.
This work was carried out in collaboration with prof. Michael Wagner, prosody.lab (http://prosodylab.org/), McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
Short bio of the speaker:
Branislav Gerazov holds an associate professor position at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies (FEEIT), where he’s been engaged in teaching and research since 2007. He teaches courses on Electroacoustics, Digital Audio Systems, and Biomedical Electronics. He has authored over 70 scientific peer-reviewed publications in journals, international and national conferences, and authored one patent. He has completed a 16 month research stay in GIPSA-lab, Grenoble, France, and was a visiting researcher for 6 months at Idiap, Martigny, Switzerland. His research focuses on the analysis, processing, recognition and synthesis of speech, as well as audio and biomedical signals.