This National Science Foundation project grant of $260,147 will fund research at the University of Washington from May 2022 to April 2025 under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070). The research aims to improve speech technology and develop automated oral literacy assessment tools for young speakers of African American English to enhance early education outcomes. Specifically, the university researchers will develop data augmentation and normalization...
This $178,992 National Science Foundation project grant supports research at Georgia State University Research Foundation to improve speech technology for better learning outcomes among African American English-speaking children. Funded under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering program, the three-year award aims to develop data augmentation and normalization techniques to increase the amount of training data available and improve automatic speech recognition performance for this...
The National Science Foundation Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences awarded a $200,000 Project Grant under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.075) to the University of Illinois on February 15, 2022. The grant will support research to develop new evaluation and training paradigms for inclusive automatic speech recognition over a three-year period ending January 31, 2025. Specifically, the university will create open-source black-box and...
This National Science Foundation project grant of $550,000 supports research to evaluate computational models of infant language acquisition against experimental data on English- and Spanish-learning infants. Funded under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program (CFDA 47.075), the award will enable researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles to directly compare the output of different computational word segmentation models to infant behavioral data on the acquisition of...
This $244,179 federal Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) program (CFDA 47.070) supports research to develop personalized, privacy-preserving, and resource-efficient speech enhancement systems. The project aims to achieve personalization of speech enhancement models without requiring clean speech data from the end-user, using techniques such as no-shot and few-shot learning, adversarial optimization, and...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Social and Economic Sciences award, CFDA 47.075, provides $507,066 to Montclair State University to create a corpus of annotated speech data for African American English, Latinx English, and European American English. The goal is to advance scientific understanding of prosody and develop tools for automatic detection of accent and phrase boundaries across these language varieties. A team of 7 diverse students will receive training through the...
This federal Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (CFDA 47.075) program provides $370,236 to the University of South Florida to use sensing technology and automated speech recognition to capture teacher-child language interactions in diverse pre-K classrooms. The project aims to examine how often preschool teachers engage in language interactions with students, whether certain children receive fewer or briefer interactions,...
The National Science Foundation awarded $122,710 under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.075) to Stanford University from June 2022 to July 2023. The project aims to increase diversity in the linguistic sciences through an Research Experiences for Undergraduates site examining the role of language in social mobility. Undergraduate students from historically black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions will conduct...
The National Science Foundation Division of Information and Intelligent Systems awarded a $400,000 Project Grant to The Regents of the University of California for collaborative research titled "Flexible Deep Speech Synthesis through Gestural Modeling." The three-year award runs from October 1, 2021 through September 30, 2024. The research aims to advance development of flexible deep speech synthesis through gestural modeling, in alignment with the goals of the Computer and Information...
The University of Massachusetts received a $434,027 project grant award from the National Science Foundation on March 1, 2021 to fund the project "UNDERSTANDING VARIATION IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LANGUAGE: CORPUS AND PROSODIC FIELDWORK PERSPECTIVES" through August 31, 2024. The grant is part of NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program (CFDA #47.075), which aims to contribute to scientific strength and welfare through promotion of basic research and education in these...