Automated speech and audio analysis for semantic access to multimedia

The deployment and integration of audio processing tools can enhance the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and as a consequence, improve the effectiveness of conceptual access tools. This paper overviews the various ways in which automatic speech and audio analysis can contribute to increased granularity of automatically extracted metadata. A number of techniques will be presented, including the alignment of speech and text resources, large vocabulary speech recognition, key word spotting and speaker classification. The applicability of techniques will be discussed from a media crossing perspective. The added value of the techniques and their potential contribution to the content value chain will be illustrated by the description of two (complementary) demonstrators for browsing broadcast news archives

Temporal and Lexical Context of Diachronic Text Documents for Automatic Out-Of-Vocabulary Proper Name Retrieval

International audienceProper name recognition is a challenging task in information retrieval from large audio/video databases. Proper names are semantically rich and are usually key to understanding the information contained in a document. Our work focuses on increasing the vocabulary coverage of a speech transcription system by automatically retrieving proper names from contemporary diachronic text documents. We proposed methods that dynamically augment the automatic speech recognition system vocabulary using lexical and temporal features in diachronic documents. We also studied different metrics for proper name selection in order to limit the vocabulary augmentation and therefore the impact on the ASR performances. Recognition results show a significant reduction of the proper name error rate using an augmented vocabulary

Modelling Semantic Context of OOV Words in Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition

International audienceThe diachronic nature of broadcast news data leads to the problem of Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) words in Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) systems. Analysis of OOV words reveals that a majority of them are Proper Names (PNs). However PNs are important for automatic indexing of audio-video content and for obtaining reliable automatic transcriptions. In this paper, we focus on the problem of OOV PNs in diachronic audio documents. To enable recovery of the PNs missed by the LVCSR system, relevant OOV PNs are retrieved by exploiting the semantic context of the LVCSR transcriptions. For retrieval of OOV PNs, we explore topic and semantic context derived from Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic models, continuous word vector representations and the Neural Bag-of-Words (NBOW) model which is capable of learning task specific word and context representations. We propose a Neural Bag-of-Weighted Words (NBOW2) model which learns to assign higher weights to words that are important for retrieval of an OOV PN. With experiments on French broadcast news videos we show that the NBOW and NBOW2 models outperform the methods based on raw embeddings from LDA and Skip-gram models. Combining the NBOW and NBOW2 models gives a faster convergence during training. Second pass speech recognition experiments, in which the LVCSR vocabulary and language model are updated with the retrieved OOV PNs, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed context models

Neural Networks Revisited for Proper Name Retrieval from Diachronic Documents

International audienceDeveloping high-quality transcription systems for very large vocabulary corpora is a challenging task. Proper names are usually key to understanding the information contained in a document. To increase the vocabulary coverage, a huge amount of text data should be used. In this paper, we extend the previously proposed neural networks for word embedding models: word vector representation proposed by Mikolov is enriched by an additional non-linear transformation. This model allows to better take into account lexical and semantic word relationships. In the context of broadcast news transcription and in terms of recall, experimental results show a good ability of the proposed model to select new relevant proper names

Lessons Learned from EVALITA 2020 and Thirteen Years of Evaluation of Italian Language Technology

This paper provides a summary of the 7th Evaluation Campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian (EVALITA2020) which was held online on December 17th, due to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 edition of Evalita included 14 different tasks belonging to five research areas, namely: (i) Affect, Hate, and Stance, (ii) Creativity and Style, (iii) New Challenges in Long-standing Tasks, (iv) Semantics and Multimodality, (v) Time and Diachrony. This paper provides a description of the tasks and the key findings from the analysis of participant outcomes. Moreover, it provides a detailed analysis of the participants and task organizers which demonstrates the growing interest with respect to this campaign. Finally, a detailed analysis of the evaluation of tasks across the past seven editions is provided; this allows to assess how the research carried out by the Italian community dealing with Computational Linguistics has evolved in terms of popular tasks and paradigms during the last 13 years

Adapter le vocabulaire d'un système de transcription automatique de la parole aux thèmes abordés

Pour accéder à la sémantique de documents multimédias (flux de TV, vidéos), nous utilisons des systèmes de reconnaissance de la parole qui produisent un texte correspondant à ce qui a été prononcé. Ces systèmes fonctionnent, entre autres, grâce à un vocabulaire contenant l'ensemble figé des mots qu'ils peuvent reconnaître, et à un modèle de langue regroupant les probabilités de succession des mots du vocabulaire. Bien qu'en règle générale les transcriptions ainsi obtenues soient fiables, ces systèmes ne sont pas spécialisés pour des thèmes bien précis (le sport, la guerre en Irak, etc.), ce qui conduit à des erreurs de transcription des termes spécifiques aux thèmes. Une adaptation thématique du modèle de langue et du vocabulaire est donc nécessaire. C'est sur ce dernier point que porte le stage. En effet, il s'agit de sélectionner les mots absents des transcriptions. Une solution immédiate consiste à sélectionner, dans un ensemble de textes traitant du thème d'une transcription (corpus d'adaptation), tous les mots absents du vocabulaire et à les ajouter au système. Cette méthode n'est pas satisfaisante car elle peut conduire à un afflux de mots, sans intérêt réel et dégradant éventuellement les performances du système. Ainsi, pour éviter ces problèmes, deux méthodes de filtrage, l'une phonétique et l'autre grammaticale, ont été mises en place et permettent de récupérer, pour une transcription, 63.6% des mots manquants sur les 50% possibles de retrouver dans des corpus d'adaptation. Un second objectif est donc d'augmenter le nombre de mots récupérables en se basant sur les racines morphologiques des mots présents dans les transcriptions

Dynamic language modeling for European Portuguese

Doutoramento em Engenharia InformáticaActualmente muitas das metodologias utilizadas para transcrição e indexação de transmissões noticiosas são baseadas em processos manuais. Com o processamento e transcrição deste tipo de dados os prestadores de serviços noticiosos procuram extrair informação semântica que permita a sua interpretação, sumarização, indexação e posterior disseminação selectiva. Pelo que, o desenvolvimento e implementação de técnicas automáticas para suporte deste tipo de tarefas têm suscitado ao longo dos últimos anos o interesse pela utilização de sistemas de reconhecimento automático de fala. Contudo, as especificidades que caracterizam este tipo de tarefas, nomeadamente a diversidade de tópicos presentes nos blocos de notícias, originam um elevado número de ocorrência de novas palavras não incluídas no vocabulário finito do sistema de reconhecimento, o que se traduz negativamente na qualidade das transcrições automáticas produzidas pelo mesmo. Para línguas altamente flexivas, como é o caso do Português Europeu, este problema torna-se ainda mais relevante. Para colmatar este tipo de problemas no sistema de reconhecimento, várias abordagens podem ser exploradas: a utilização de informações específicas de cada um dos blocos noticiosos a ser transcrito, como por exemplo os scripts previamente produzidos pelo pivot e restantes jornalistas, e outro tipo de fontes como notícias escritas diariamente disponibilizadas na Internet. Este trabalho engloba essencialmente três contribuições: um novo algoritmo para selecção e optimização do vocabulário, utilizando informação morfosintáctica de forma a compensar as diferenças linguísticas existentes entre os diferentes conjuntos de dados; uma metodologia diária para adaptação dinâmica e não supervisionada do modelo de linguagem, utilizando múltiplos passos de reconhecimento; metodologia para inclusão de novas palavras no vocabulário do sistema, mesmo em situações de não existência de dados de adaptação e sem necessidade re-estimação global do modelo de linguagem.Most of today methods for transcription and indexation of broadcast audio data are manual. Broadcasters process thousands hours of audio and video data on a daily basis, in order to transcribe that data, to extract semantic information, and to interpret and summarize the content of those documents. The development of automatic and efficient support for these manual tasks has been a great challenge and over the last decade there has been a growing interest in the usage of automatic speech recognition as a tool to provide automatic transcription and indexation of broadcast news and random and relevant access to large broadcast news databases. However, due to the common topic changing over time which characterizes this kind of tasks, the appearance of new events leads to high out-of-vocabulary (OOV) word rates and consequently to degradation of recognition performance. This is especially true for highly inflected languages like the European Portuguese language. Several innovative techniques can be exploited to reduce those errors. The use of news shows specific information, such as topic-based lexicons, pivot working script, and other sources such as the online written news daily available in the Internet can be added to the information sources employed by the automatic speech recognizer. In this thesis we are exploring the use of additional sources of information for vocabulary optimization and language model adaptation of a European Portuguese broadcast news transcription system. Hence, this thesis has 3 different main contributions: a novel approach for vocabulary selection using Part-Of-Speech (POS) tags to compensate for word usage differences across the various training corpora; language model adaptation frameworks performed on a daily basis for single-stage and multistage recognition approaches; a new method for inclusion of new words in the system vocabulary without the need of additional data or language model retraining

from media to dictionary

UIDB/03213/2020 UIDP/03213/2020 UID/LIN/03213/2020This paper discusses the creation and use of neologisms resulting from the worldwide situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, its occurrences in the press and social networks and how European Portuguese dictionaries have incorporated them (or not). We selected four neologisms candidates: two units referring to the disease designation (COVID-19; coronavirus, ‘coronavirus’), the other corresponding to a metonym for particular diseases (pandemia, ‘pandemic’) and a prefix element (tele-) related to the way of accomplishing certain tasks in the so-called “new normal” or “post-pandemic scenario”. Our goal is to observe the morphological formation of these units, their uses, and meanings. The data analysis aims to demonstrate the vitality of the lexical neology process in the domain of COVID-19 in a specific period (2019-2021), and how dictionaries are representing the neologisms.publishersversionpublishe

RNN Language Model Estimation for Out-of-Vocabulary Words

International audienceOne important issue of speech recognition systems is Out-of Vocabulary words (OOV). These words, often proper nouns or new words, are essential for documents to be transcribed correctly. Thus, they must be integrated in the language model (LM) and the lexicon of the speech recognition system. This article proposes new approaches to OOV proper noun probability estimation using Recurrent Neural Network Language Model (RNNLM). The proposed approaches are based on the notion of closest in-vocabulary (IV) words (list of brothers) to a given OOV proper noun. The probabilities of these words are used to estimate the probabilities of OOV proper nouns thanks to RNNLM. Three methods for retrieving the relevant list of brothers are studied. The main advantages of the proposed approaches are that the RNNLM is not retrained and the architecture of the RNNLM is kept intact. Experiments on real text data from the website of the Euronews channel show relative perplexity reductions of about 14% compared to baseline RNNLM

Out-of-Vocabulary Word Probability Estimation using RNN Language Model

International audienceOne important issue of speech recognition systems is Out-of Vocabulary words (OOV). These words, often proper nouns or new words, are essential for documents to be transcribed correctly. Thus, they must be integrated in the language model (LM) and the lexicon of the speech recognition system. This article proposes new approaches to OOV proper noun estimation using Recurrent Neural Network Language Model (RNNLM). The proposed approaches are based on the notion of closest in-vocabulary (IV) words (list of brothers) to a given OOV proper noun. The probabilities of these words are used to estimate the probabilities of OOV proper nouns thanks to RNNLM. Three methods for retrieving the relevant list of brothers are studied. The main advantages of the proposed approaches are that the RNNLM is not retrained and the architecture of the RNNLM is kept intact. Experiments on real text data from the website of the Euronews channel show perplexity reductions of about 14% relative compared to baseline RNNLM