SAT4DH 2015 - Workshop on Speech and Audio Technologies for the Digital Humanities (SAT4DH)

The field of Digital Humanities (DH) combines methodologies from traditional humanities disciplines (such as history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, archaeology, music, and cultural studies) and social sciences with tools provided by digital publishing and computing (such as data visualization, audio-visual indexing, information retrieval, data mining, statistics, etc.). It is of increasing interest for the speech technology community: Firstly, this domain has a high demand for speech technology and applications. There are several areas in the Digital Humanities that involve huge amounts of audio-visual data sources (e.g. oral history, archives of special historical fields, endangered languages, etc.). Speech technology can help to provide a better access to these data and to extract relevant information. This should allow scientists in the Digital Humanities to generate and answer new research questions.
Secondly, audio-visual data sets pose new research challenges for speech and audio researchers: Often the recordings of Digital Humanities scenarios are small, fragmented and of limited quality. Little established linguistic knowledge is usually available. Further, the speech is often natural and spontaneous. Therefore, new and better speech processing techniques are required.