Formatting instructions

Please be sure to check general turnitin submission guidance on the PPLS hub. 

You must:

• submit a single document in PDF format. When submitting to Learn, the electronic submission title must be in the format “exam number_wordcount” and nothing else (e.g., “B012345_2864”)
• state your exam number at the top of every page of the document
• state the word count below the title on the first page in the document (e.g., “word count: 2864”)
• use a line spacing of 1.5 and a minimum font size of 11pt (and that applies to all text, including within figures, tables, and captions)
• If you work with a partner, you should also note their exam number either where you list your exam number in the title, or in a footnote from the introduction.

Marking is strictly anonymous. Do not include your name or your student number – only provide your exam number!

Structure

Length limits

• Word limit: 3000 words, excluding bibliography and text within figures and tables but including all other text (such as headings, footnotes captions, examples). Numerical data does not count as text.
  • The word limit is a hard limit: there is no +10% allowance.
  • Text in figures and tables doesn’t contribute to the word count but, again, use this wisely! Don’t just shove things into tables because they don’t fit in your text!
  • Note: You should assume that the markers will only read up to the word limit (i.e. 3000 words).  We have had to enforce this because some people have submitted assignments that were hugely over the word limit and it’s not fair on the markers to ask them to read so much over the word count.
• Page limit: no limit, but avoid blank pages
• Figures & tables: no limit on number

Sections and headings

You must use the following structure and section numbering for your report. It corresponds to the structured marking scheme and will make your marker’s life so much easier!

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theory
  • 2.1 Data collection and acoustic features
  • 2.2 Training HMMs
  • 2.3 Language modelling
  • 2.4 Recognition using HMMs
• 3 Experiments
  • 3.1 [Insert your first experiment title here]
  • 3.2 [Insert your second experiment title here]
  • 3.3 etc, for as many experiments as you wish
• 4 Discussion and overall conclusion

You can focus on your speaker-dependent isolated digit system in Sections 2.1 to 2.4 to illustrate the differences between theory and practice.  Alternatively, in 2.1-2.4, you may instead go for a more general description of your speaker-independent system. As you don’t have to record and label your own data this year, you can describe this conceptually. If you want to use a concrete example to help illustrate, you can reference a speaker-dependent system built using an existing speakers data set (e.g. ‘simonk’). Although data collection is optional this year, you still need to describe what data are required, how they need to be labelled and so on – the marks for this are under “2.1 Data collection and acoustic features”.

You are advised to structure each experimental section (3.1, 3.2, etc) by introducing and motivating a hypothesis, describing your experimental design, reporting the results, and drawing a conclusion. You should aim to write up 3-4 experiments. You may be able to fit more in, but don’t forget you need to motivate each experiment and analyze the results. It’s fine to design your experiments based on the suggestions given in the instructions (e.g. gender, microphone type, amount of training data), but you may find there are more interesting things to explore.  Experimental designs that allow you to draw conclusions across different experiments are not required, but they are definitely appreciated.

Figure, graphs and tables

You should ensure that figures and graphs are large enough to read easily and are of high-quality (with a very strong preference for vector graphics, and failing that high-resolution images). You are strongly advised to draw your own figures which will generally attract a higher mark than a figure quoted from another source.

There is no page limit, so therefore there is no reason to have very small figures.

Your work may be marked electronically or we may print hardcopies on A4 paper, so it must be legible in both formats. In particular, do not assume the markers can “zoom in” to make the figures larger.

Declaration of use of AI

Please briefly describe if you use any external Artificial Intelligence (AI) related tools in doing this assignment.  This includes grammar checking and use of generative AI based chat apps to investigate the topic.  If you use tools based on large language models (e.g. ChatGPT), describe the prompts that you used in doing this work.  If you did not use these tools in your work, you can simply write “none”.

Text in this section does not count towards the 3000 word limit.

Remember, you should not use generative AI to generate text for your submitted report.  Please see the course AI policy here:  Speech Processing AI policy.  Please be honest!  You will not be penalised for use of these tools as long as you stick to this policy.

Marking scheme

You are strongly advised to read the marking scheme because it will help you focus your effort and decide how much to write in each section of your report.

Here is the structured marking sheet for this assignment (this is the version for 2023-24, which is the same as previous years). Although data collection is optional this year, you still need to describe what data are required, how they need to be labelled and so on – the marks for this are under “2.1 Data collection and acoustic features”. If you did collect your own data, you may obtain extra marks under the “Additional” section.