SPIRE: Signal Processing Interpretation and Representation Lab

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English Gyani

About

'English Gyani' is a project designed to enhance English comprehension, reading and spoken English skills, particularly for individuals who face barriers to accessing traditional English learning materials or institutions. It addresses the growing demand for English proficiency in employment and career advancement opportunities.
The lessons in 'English Gyani' are categorized into key areas to improve vocabulary, grammar, and sentence construction. These are the foundational elements of English comprehension. In addition, the platform also focuses on reading skills, covering factors such as pronunciation, stress, and intonation to help learners convey meaning effectively when speaking. Emphasis is placed on fluency, expressiveness, and the ability to speak English clearly and confidently.
'English Gyani' is different from traditional spoken English schools in its ability to offer personalized, real-time feedback. Through voice interaction, learners can engage with lessons as they would in a classroom, receiving individualized guidance and support.

Objective:

To empower individuals with essential English language skills by providing accessible, interactive, and personalized learning resources that enhance vocabulary, grammar, reading, and spoken English proficiency. The project aims to break traditional learning barriers, promote confidence in communication, and equip learners with the tools necessary for career and personal growth in an increasingly English-driven world.

Background and Motivation:

In spite of language-diversity in India, English is a common language that connects people at work. However a significant percentage of graduates in India are not employable due to lack of English language knowledge. It is also known that English communication skills increase the hourly wages. Although spoken English is an important aspect for one’s ability to get a good job and prosperity, majority of the students and employees lack it. This could be because only a small percentage of students study in English medium schools. There are several spoken English schools, but people, although interested, often fail to attend due to physical or demographic constraints. As an alternative to these, several English learning apps have been developed, a survey of which reveals that they provide feedback at a gross level without any detailed prescription on pronunciation and fluency. This growing demand for spoken English learning has led to the genesis of English Gyani.

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Publications

Journals (Accepted and/or Published):

Chiranjeevi Yarra , P. K. Ghosh, , "Automatic syllable stress detection under non-parallel label and data condition"Speech Communication, Elsevier [PDF]
Aparna Srinivasan, Diviya Singh, Chiranjeevi Yarra, Aravind Illa, P. K. Ghosh,, "A robust speaking rate estimator using a CNN-BLSTM network"Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing, 2021 [PDF]
Chiranjeevi Yarra, Supriya Nagesh, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh., "Noise robust speech rate estimation using SNR dependent sub-band selection and peak detection strategy"The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America [PDF]
Chiranjeevi Yarra, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh., "Automatic intonation classification using temporal patterns in utterance-level pitch contour and perceptually motivated pitch transformation"The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 144.5 (2018): EL471-EL476 [PDF]
Chiranjeevi Yarra, Om D. Deshmukh, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh., "A frame selective dynamic programming approach for noise robust pitch estimation"The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 143, no. 4 (2018): 2289--2300 [PDF]
Srinivasa Raghavan, Nisha Meenakshi, Sanjeev Kumar Mittal, Chiranjeevi Yarra, Anupam Mandal, K R Prasanna Kumar, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh., "A Comparative Study on the Effect of Different Codecs on Speech Recognition Accuracy Using Various Acoustic Modeling Techniques"In Communications (NCC), 2017 Twenty-third National Conference on (pp. 1-6). IEEE [PDF] [Poster]
Yarra, Chiranjeevi, Om D. Deshmukh, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh., "A mode-shape classification technique for robust speech rate estimation and syllable nuclei detection"Speech Communication 78 (2016): 62-71 [PDF]

Conferences (Accepted and/or Published):

Priyanshi Pal, Shelly Jain, Chiranjeevi Yarra, P. K. Ghosh Anil Kumar Vuppala, "Study of Indian English Pronunciation variabilities relative to Received Pronunciation" SPECOM 2023 [PDF]
Chowdam Venkata Thirumala Kumar, MEENAKSHI SIRIGIRAJU, Rakesh Vaideeswaran Mahesh, P. K. Ghosh, Chiranjeevi Yarra, "Can the decoded text from automatic speech recognition effectively detect spoken grammar errors?"SLATE 2023 [PDF]
Shelly Jain, Priyanshi Pal, Anil Vuppala, P. K. Ghosh, Chiranjeevi Yarra, "An Investigation of Indian Native Language Phonemic Influences on L2 English Pronunciations" INTERSPEECH 2023 [PDF]
Priyanshi Pal, Chiranjeevi Yarra, P. K. Ghosh, "voisTUTOR 2.0: A speech corpus with phonetic transcription for pronunciation evaluation of Indian L2 English learners" O-COCOSDA 2022 [PDF]
Chiranjeevi Yarra , P. K. Ghosh, , "Noise robust pitch stylization using minimum mean absolute error criterion"Interspeech 2021, Brno, Czech Republic [PDF] [Slides] [Presentation]
Pavan Kumar J, Chiranjeevi Yarra, P. K. Ghosh,, "DNN Based Phrase Boundary Detection Using Knowledge-Based Features and Feature Representations from CNN"2021 National Conference on Communications(NCC) [PDF]
Chiranjeevi Yarra, Kausthubha N K , P. K. Ghosh. , "SPIRE-ABC: An online tool for acoustic-unit boundary correction (ABC) via crowdsourcing" Oriental COCOSDA 2020 [PDF] [Slides] [Presentation]
Avni Rajpal, Achuth Rao MV, Chiranjeevi Yarra, Ritu Aggarwal, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh,, "Pseudo Likelihood Correction Technique For Low Resource Accented ASR"ICASSP 2020 [PDF] [Slides]
Chiranjeevi Yarra, Ritu Aggarwal, Avni Rajpal, P. K. Ghosh. , "Indic TIMIT and Indic English lexicon: A speech database of Indian speakers using TIMIT stimuli and a lexicon from their mispronunciations"Oriental COCOSDA 2019 [PDF] [Slides]
Chiranjeevi Yarra, Aparna Srinivasan, Chandana Srinivasa, Ritu Aggarwal, P. K. Ghosh. , "voisTUTOR corpus: A speech corpus of Indian L2 English learners for pronunciation assessment"Oriental COCOSDA 2019 [PDF]
Chiranjeevi Yarra, P. K. Ghosh. , "voisTUTOR: Virtual Operator for Interactive Spoken English TUTORing"8th Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education, 2019 [PDF] [Slides]
Chiranjeevi Yarra, Manoj Kumar Ramanathi, P. K. Ghosh. , "Comparison of automatic syllable stress detection quality with time-aligned boundaries and context dependencies"8th Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education, 2019 [PDF] [Slides]
Aparna Srinivasan, Chiranjeevi Yarra, P. K. Ghosh., "Automatic assessment of pronunciation and its dependent factors by exploring their interdependencies using DNN and LSTM"8th Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education, 2019 [PDF] [Slides]
Sweekar Sudhakara, Manoj Kumar Ramanathi, Chiranjeevi Yarra, Anurag Das, P. K. Ghosh., "Noise robust goodness of pronunciation measures using teacher's utterance"8th Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education, 2019 [PDF] [Poster]
Manoj Kumar Ramanathi, Chiranjeevi Yarra, P. K. Ghosh., "ASR inspired syllable stress detection for pronunciation evaluation without using a supervised classifier and syllable level features"Interspeech 2019, Graz, Austria [PDF] [Poster]
Atreyee Saha, Chiranjeevi Yarra, P. K. Ghosh., "Low resource automatic intonation classification using gated recurrent unit (GRU) networks pre-trained with synthesized pitch patterns"Interspeech 2019, Graz, Austria [PDF] [Poster]
Sweekar Sudhakara, Manoj Kumar Ramanathi, Chiranjeevi Yarra, P. K. Ghosh., "An improved goodness of pronunciation (GoP) measure for pronunciation evaluation with DNN-HMM system considering HMM transition probabilities"Interspeech 2019, Graz, Austria [PDF] [Poster]
Chiranjeevi Yarra, Aparna Srinivasan, Sravani Gottimukkala, P. K. Ghosh., "SPIRE-fluent: A self-learning app for tutoring oral fluency to second language English learners"Interspeech 2019, Graz, Austria [PDF] [Poster]
Chandana S, Chiranjeevi Yarra, Ritu Aggarwal, Sanjeev Kumar Mittal, Kausthubha N K, Raseena K T, Astha Singh, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh., "Automatic visual augmentation for concatenation based synthesized articulatory videos from real-time MRI data for spoken language training"Interspeech, Hyderabad, India, 2018, Page(s): 3127-3131 [PDF]
Anand P A, Chiranjeevi Yarra, Kausthubha N K, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh., "Intonation tutor by SPIRE (In-SPIRE): An online tool for an automatic feedback to the second language learners in learning intonation"In Proc. Interspeech, Hyderabad, India, 2018, Page(s): 546-547 [PDF]
Chiranjeevi Yarra, Anand P A, Kausthubha N K, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh., "SPIRE-SST: An automatic web-based self-learning tool for syllable stress tutoring (SST) to the second language learners"In Proc. Interspeech, Hyderabad, India, 2018, Page(s): 2390-2391 [PDF]
Urvish Desai, Chiranjeevi Yarra, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh., "CONCATENATIVE ARTICULATORY VIDEO SYNTHESIS USING REAL-TIME MRI DATA FOR SPOKEN LANGUAGE TRAINING"In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2018, page(s): 4999-5003 [PDF] [Slides]
Chiranjeevi Yarra, Om D. Deshmukh, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh., "An automatic detection of syllable stress using sonority based prominence features for pronunciation evaluation"In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2017, (pp. 5845-5849) [PDF] [Poster]
Nagesh, Supriya, Chiranjeevi Yarra, Om D. Deshmukh, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh., "A robust speech rate estimation based on the activation profile from the selected acoustic unit dictionary"In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 5400-5404. 2016. [PDF]
Nisha Meenakshi, Chiranjeevi Yarra, B. K. Yamini, P. K. Ghosh, "Comparison of speech quality with and without sensors in electromagnetic articulograph AG 501 recording"InterSpeech, 2014 [PDF]
Abhayjeet Singh, Achuth Rao M V, Rakesh Vaideeswaran, Chiranjeevi Yarra, P. K. Ghosh, , "A Study on native American English speech recognition by Indian listeners with varying word familiarity level"Oriental COCOSDA 2021 [PDF] [Slides] [Presentation]
Anuj Diwan, Rakesh Vaideeswaran, Sanket Shah, Ankita Singh, Srinivasa Raghavan K M, Shreya Khare, Vinit Unni, saurabh vyas, Akash Rajapuria, Chiranjeevi Yarra, Ashish Mittal, P. K. Ghosh, Preethi Jyothi, Kalika Bali, Vivek Seshadri, Sunayana Sitaram, Samarth Bharadwaj, Jai Nanavati, Raoul Nanavati , Karthik Sankaranarayanan, , "Multilingual and code-switching ASR challenges for low resource Indian languages"Interspeech 2021, Brno, Czech Republic [PDF] [Slides] [Presentation]