GSoC 2012: #Troy Pronunciation Evaluation Week 7 Status

Last week, I was still working on the data collection website.

Thank Robert (butler1970@gmail.com) so much for trying out the website and listed the issues he encountered on this page: https://www.evernote.com/pub/butler1970/cmusphinx#b=11634bf8-7be9-479f-a20e-6fa1e54b322b&n=398dc728-b3f0-4ceb-8ccf-89295b98a6d7

Issue #1: The under construction of Student Page

The first stage of the website to collect exemplar recordings, thus the student page is not implemented at that time. 

Issue #2: The inconvenient birthdate control

The birthdate control is now replaced with the standard HTML5 <input type="datetime"> control. Due to the datetime input control is a new element in HTML5, currently only Chrome, Safari and Opera support the popup date selection. On other browsers, which have on support yet, the control will simply be displayed as an input box. The user can just type in the date and the background script will check whether the format is correct or not.

Issue #3: The incorrect error message "Invalid date format" on the additional information update page

After digging into the source code to find the problem for several hours, the bug lies in the order of invoking mysql related functions. The processing steps in the additional information update page is as follows:

a) client side post the user input information to the server;

b) server side first using mysql_escape_string function to preprocess the user information to ensure the security of later mysql queries;

c) check the format of each field including the date time format, whether the user inputs a valid date;

d) update the mysql database with the new information.

As only in step d) the mysql sever action is needed, I thus put the database connection code behind step c), without knowing the mysql_escape_string function also requires mysql database connection. In the previous implementation, the mysql_escape_string returns empty string thus leads to invalid date format. 

Secondly, the exemplar recording page is update with following features:

1) Automatically move to the next utterance after the user record and playback the current recording;

2) Adding extra navigation control for recording phrase selection;

3) When the user opens the exemplar recording page, the first un-recorded utterance will be set to the first one shown the user.

4) Connection the enable and disable of recording and playback buttons of the player with the database information, i.e. if the user has recorded the phrase before, both the recording and playback buttons are enabled, otherwise only recording is allowed.

The third major part done in last week is the student page which is previously left empty.

For the student page, users now can also practice their pronunciation by recording the phrases in the database and also listening to the exemplar recordings in the system. The features are:

1) Full recording and playback functionalities as exemplar recording;

2) When navigating to each phrase, randomly maximum 5 exemplar recordings from the system are retrieved from the database and listed on the page to help the students. 

3) Additionally, to put some exemplar recordings in the system, I have to manually transcribe several sentences and put the recordings into the system for use. After there are many people contributing to the exemplar recordings, I don't need to do manually transcription any more.

For this week, two major tasks to be done: integration with Ronanki's evaluation scripts and mid-term report.