Deep underground in the halls of the University of Malta, scientists and engineers are scrambling to teach an artificial brain the spoken Maltese language. They call it Project MASRI, which stands for ‘Maltese Automatic Speech Recognition’ – a cool acronym for a rather blunt and unoriginal project title.

You may have come across the general idea behind automatic speech recognition (ASR) if you’ve heard of Siri and Google Now – the fancy and sometimes smart voice assistants on your smartphones and smart home systems. That is all well and good, but the tools do not work for the Maltese language. That is all about to change.

 Over the course of the last two years, researchers from three units at the University of Malta have teamed up to change an aspect of the technological landscape for the Maltese language. Members from the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology, the Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy, and the Department of Artificial Intelligence are combining their efforts in various areas such as signal processing, machine learning and language modelling, to bring the Maltese language into the 21st century and onto your pocket devices.

 So how is it all done? Any word you can think of can possibly begin a sentence. So the first word in a sentence can be one of tens of thousands. If any word were as likely to appear in any position as any other word, then a five-word utterance from a vocabulary of 20,000 words would have a whopping 3,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 possibilities!

Given the scale of problems faced by language technologists, coupled with bad quality audio recorded on cheap microphones with a lot of background noise, the task of speech recognition seems impossible.

Luckily, languages are far from random. The computer does not need to guess from a full vocabulary of Maltese what word you have spoken. The trained artificial brain will assess the likelihood of you having said a particular word based on the surrounding words.

Statistical analysis of vast amounts of digital Maltese resources will be leveraged to learn these patterns. Taken in chunks, the conclusion of picking “ir-rikonoxximent tal-Malti mitkellem” over “ir-rikonoxximent tal-Malti mitt kellem”, despite the similar acoustics, will be part of the intelligent guesswork MASRI will be capable of.

The MASRI team is working on many fronts, combining the latest in computational speech processing with the collection of a first large-scale sanitised speech corpus for Maltese, with long hours of training data to be fed to the MASRI system.

The focus is to build a system that can learn more about the language over its lifetime. Very soon, our favourite devices will be waiting for our sweet voices to call out “Isma Masri…”

Dr Andrea DeMarco is a lecturer at the Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy, associate member of the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology, and member of the ICT sub-committee of the National Council for the Maltese Language.

Sound bites

• A recently published study describes a form of communication that goes on between bacteria and the mammals that they reside in. Through this ‘interspecies communication’, the bacteria secrete a specific molecule – nitric oxide – that allows them to communicate and control their hosts’ DNA, suggesting that this conversation could broadly influence human health.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190221130252.htm

• A team of researchers has linked sensitivity to an allergen in red meat to the buildup of plaque in the arteries of the heart, which would result in a subgroup of the population being at heightened risk of heart disease. This was the first time that a specific blood marker for red meat allergy was associated with higher levels of arterial plaque or fatty deposits on the inner lining of the arteries.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180614095229.htm

For more soundbites listen to Radio Mocha on Mondays at 7pm on Radju Malta and Thursdays at 4pm on Radju Malta 2 https://www.fb.com/RadioMochaMalta/

Did you know?

• According to research, humans began wearing shoes around 40,000 years ago. This was calculated by analysing foot bones from Neanderthals and early humans.

• The big toe used to be a kind of foot thumb that helped our prede­cessors climb trees.

• Nowadays, if you lose your thumb, it can be replaced with a toe, and toe-to-thumb transplants are a surprisingly common procedure these days.

• Research shows that the average foot size is increasing as people have grown taller and heavier.

• The Guinness World Record holds an entry for the highest number of feet and armpits sniffed, held by Madeline Albrecht, who sniffed approximately 5,600 feet during her career in a testing lab for products by Dr Scholl.

For more trivia see: www.um.edu.mt/think

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