Research Projects



The CSLU Toolkit is CSLU's way of providing accessible language resources to society for research, system development and education in human language technologies and interactive systems. The Toolkit is supports research in language technologies, and provides authoring tools for incorporating these technologies in useful applications. As such, the toolkit provides essential infrastructure for all of our research activities.

Language Training is CSLU's most exciting and visible project. Funded by a $1.8 million NSF Challenge Grant. The goal of this project is to develop an animated conversational agent for learning and language training with profoundly deaf children.

We have a long-standing collaboration with Piero Cosi at the Italian Institute of Phonetics and Dialectology (IFD) for the development of an Italian version of the CSLU Toolkit. This project, funded mainly by IFD, has resulted in accurate Italian digit and general-purpose recognition systems, and more recently in Italian text-to-speech using Festival (with three signal-processing methods: RE-LPC, OGI-FESTIVAL-PlugIN-RE-LPC, and MBROLA). The animated face component is expected to be completed shortly.

The Mexican Spanish Toolkit project aims to develop a Mexican Spanish version of the CSLU Toolkit. This project, funded by the National Science Foundation grant to OGI, and a CONACyT grant to the Universidad de las Americas Puebla (UDLA), has resulted in a functional Mexican Spanish CSLU Toolkit, and the formation of the TLATOA speech group at UDLA.

The Brazilian Portuguese Toolkit (Spoltech) project aims to develop a Brazilian Portuguese version of the CSLU Toolkit. This project, funded by a National Science Foundation grant to OGI and Colorado University at Boulder, and a Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico (CNPq) grant to the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and the University of Caxias do Sul, is currently developing a Brazilian Portuguese CSLU Toolkit.