6,244 research outputs found
English Broadcast News Speech Recognition by Humans and Machines
With recent advances in deep learning, considerable attention has been given
to achieving automatic speech recognition performance close to human
performance on tasks like conversational telephone speech (CTS) recognition. In
this paper we evaluate the usefulness of these proposed techniques on broadcast
news (BN), a similar challenging task. We also perform a set of recognition
measurements to understand how close the achieved automatic speech recognition
results are to human performance on this task. On two publicly available BN
test sets, DEV04F and RT04, our speech recognition system using LSTM and
residual network based acoustic models with a combination of n-gram and neural
network language models performs at 6.5% and 5.9% word error rate. By achieving
new performance milestones on these test sets, our experiments show that
techniques developed on other related tasks, like CTS, can be transferred to
achieve similar performance. In contrast, the best measured human recognition
performance on these test sets is much lower, at 3.6% and 2.8% respectively,
indicating that there is still room for new techniques and improvements in this
space, to reach human performance levels.Comment: \copyright 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted.
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this work in other work
Exploration of audiovisual heritage using audio indexing technology
This paper discusses audio indexing tools that have been implemented for the disclosure of Dutch audiovisual cultural heritage collections. It explains the role of language models and their adaptation to historical settings and the adaptation of acoustic models for homogeneous audio collections. In addition to the benefits of cross-media linking, the requirements for successful tuning and improvement of available tools for indexing the heterogeneous A/V collections from the cultural heritage domain are reviewed. And finally the paper argues that research is needed to cope with the varying information needs for different types of users
Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda
Recorded interviews form a rich basis for scholarly inquiry. Examples include oral histories, community memory projects, and interviews conducted for broadcast media. Emerging technologies offer the potential to radically transform the way in which recorded interviews are made accessible, but this vision will demand substantial investments from a broad range of research communities. This article reviews the present state of practice for making recorded interviews available and the state-of-the-art for key component technologies. A large number of important research issues are identified, and from that set of issues, a coherent research agenda is proposed
Hi, how can I help you?: Automating enterprise IT support help desks
Question answering is one of the primary challenges of natural language
understanding. In realizing such a system, providing complex long answers to
questions is a challenging task as opposed to factoid answering as the former
needs context disambiguation. The different methods explored in the literature
can be broadly classified into three categories namely: 1) classification
based, 2) knowledge graph based and 3) retrieval based. Individually, none of
them address the need of an enterprise wide assistance system for an IT support
and maintenance domain. In this domain the variance of answers is large ranging
from factoid to structured operating procedures; the knowledge is present
across heterogeneous data sources like application specific documentation,
ticket management systems and any single technique for a general purpose
assistance is unable to scale for such a landscape. To address this, we have
built a cognitive platform with capabilities adopted for this domain. Further,
we have built a general purpose question answering system leveraging the
platform that can be instantiated for multiple products, technologies in the
support domain. The system uses a novel hybrid answering model that
orchestrates across a deep learning classifier, a knowledge graph based context
disambiguation module and a sophisticated bag-of-words search system. This
orchestration performs context switching for a provided question and also does
a smooth hand-off of the question to a human expert if none of the automated
techniques can provide a confident answer. This system has been deployed across
675 internal enterprise IT support and maintenance projects.Comment: To appear in IAAI 201
BigSSL: Exploring the Frontier of Large-Scale Semi-Supervised Learning for Automatic Speech Recognition
We summarize the results of a host of efforts using giant automatic speech
recognition (ASR) models pre-trained using large, diverse unlabeled datasets
containing approximately a million hours of audio. We find that the combination
of pre-training, self-training and scaling up model size greatly increases data
efficiency, even for extremely large tasks with tens of thousands of hours of
labeled data. In particular, on an ASR task with 34k hours of labeled data, by
fine-tuning an 8 billion parameter pre-trained Conformer model we can match
state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance with only 3% of the training data and
significantly improve SoTA with the full training set. We also report on the
universal benefits gained from using big pre-trained and self-trained models
for a large set of downstream tasks that cover a wide range of speech domains
and span multiple orders of magnitudes of dataset sizes, including obtaining
SoTA performance on many public benchmarks. In addition, we utilize the learned
representation of pre-trained networks to achieve SoTA results on non-ASR
tasks.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 13 tables; v2: minor corrections, reference
baselines and bibliography updated; v3: corrections based on reviewer
feedback, bibliography update
Lessons Learned in ATCO2: 5000 hours of Air Traffic Control Communications for Robust Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding
Voice communication between air traffic controllers (ATCos) and pilots is
critical for ensuring safe and efficient air traffic control (ATC). This task
requires high levels of awareness from ATCos and can be tedious and
error-prone. Recent attempts have been made to integrate artificial
intelligence (AI) into ATC in order to reduce the workload of ATCos. However,
the development of data-driven AI systems for ATC demands large-scale annotated
datasets, which are currently lacking in the field. This paper explores the
lessons learned from the ATCO2 project, a project that aimed to develop a
unique platform to collect and preprocess large amounts of ATC data from
airspace in real time. Audio and surveillance data were collected from publicly
accessible radio frequency channels with VHF receivers owned by a community of
volunteers and later uploaded to Opensky Network servers, which can be
considered an "unlimited source" of data. In addition, this paper reviews
previous work from ATCO2 partners, including (i) robust automatic speech
recognition, (ii) natural language processing, (iii) English language
identification of ATC communications, and (iv) the integration of surveillance
data such as ADS-B. We believe that the pipeline developed during the ATCO2
project, along with the open-sourcing of its data, will encourage research in
the ATC field. A sample of the ATCO2 corpus is available on the following
website: https://www.atco2.org/data, while the full corpus can be purchased
through ELDA at http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-S0484. We
demonstrated that ATCO2 is an appropriate dataset to develop ASR engines when
little or near to no ATC in-domain data is available. For instance, with the
CNN-TDNNf kaldi model, we reached the performance of as low as 17.9% and 24.9%
WER on public ATC datasets which is 6.6/7.6% better than "out-of-domain" but
supervised CNN-TDNNf model.Comment: Manuscript under revie
Multimodal Visual Concept Learning with Weakly Supervised Techniques
Despite the availability of a huge amount of video data accompanied by
descriptive texts, it is not always easy to exploit the information contained
in natural language in order to automatically recognize video concepts. Towards
this goal, in this paper we use textual cues as means of supervision,
introducing two weakly supervised techniques that extend the Multiple Instance
Learning (MIL) framework: the Fuzzy Sets Multiple Instance Learning (FSMIL) and
the Probabilistic Labels Multiple Instance Learning (PLMIL). The former encodes
the spatio-temporal imprecision of the linguistic descriptions with Fuzzy Sets,
while the latter models different interpretations of each description's
semantics with Probabilistic Labels, both formulated through a convex
optimization algorithm. In addition, we provide a novel technique to extract
weak labels in the presence of complex semantics, that consists of semantic
similarity computations. We evaluate our methods on two distinct problems,
namely face and action recognition, in the challenging and realistic setting of
movies accompanied by their screenplays, contained in the COGNIMUSE database.
We show that, on both tasks, our method considerably outperforms a
state-of-the-art weakly supervised approach, as well as other baselines.Comment: CVPR 201
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