Object-oriented Access to the Estonian Phonetic Database
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2000)
Abstract
The paper introduces the Estonian Phonetic Database developed at the Laboratory of Phonetics and Speech Technology of the Institute of Cybernetics at the Tallinn Technical University, and its integration into QuickSig – an object-oriented speech processing environment developed at the Acoustics Laboratory of the Helsinki University of Technology. Methods of database access are discussed, relations between different speech units – sentences, words, phonemes – are defined, examples of predicate functions are given to perform searches for different contexts, and the advantage of an object-oriented paradigm is demonstrated. The introduced approach has been proven to be a flexible research environment allowing studies to be performed in a more efficient way.