Digital Talking Books in Multiple Languages and Varieties

This paper describes our work in digital talking book alignment, starting by our earlier efforts for the alignment of books in European Portuguese, and ending with the two challenges we are currently facing of aligning books in different varieties of Portuguese and aligning parallel books in different languages. Our alignment module proved robust enough for porting to other varieties of Portuguese, despite the fact that the assessment of the recognition module without adaptation for broadcast news had shown a very severe degradation for some of the varieties. Our work on the alignment of audio in one language with text in another is still ongoing, but informal evaluation has led us to expect that digital talking books can be a valuable tool for second language learning.