Lexicon optimization for Dutch speech recognition in spoken document retrieval

In this paper, ongoing work concerning the language modelling and lexicon optimization of a Dutch speech recognition system for Spoken Document Retrieval is described: the collection and normalization of a training data set and the optimization of our recognition lexicon. Effects on lexical coverage of the amount of training data, of decompounding compound words and of different selection methods for proper names and acronyms are discussed

Subword-based Indexing for a Minimal False Positive Rate

Subword-based Indexing for a Minimal False Positive Rat

Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies

Speech media, that is, digital audio and video containing spoken content, has blossomed in recent years. Large collections are accruing on the Internet as well as in private and enterprise settings. This growth has motivated extensive research on techniques and technologies that facilitate reliable indexing and retrieval. Spoken content retrieval (SCR) requires the combination of audio and speech processing technologies with methods from information retrieval (IR). SCR research initially investigated planned speech structured in document-like units, but has subsequently shifted focus to more informal spoken content produced spontaneously, outside of the studio and in conversational settings. This survey provides an overview of the field of SCR encompassing component technologies, the relationship of SCR to text IR and automatic speech recognition and user interaction issues. It is aimed at researchers with backgrounds in speech technology or IR who are seeking deeper insight on how these fields are integrated to support research and development, thus addressing the core challenges of SCR

Exploring Spoken Named Entity Recognition: A Cross-Lingual Perspective

Recent advancements in Named Entity Recognition (NER) have significantly improved the identification of entities in textual data. However, spoken NER, a specialized field of spoken document retrieval, lags behind due to its limited research and scarce datasets. Moreover, cross-lingual transfer learning in spoken NER has remained unexplored. This paper utilizes transfer learning across Dutch, English, and German using pipeline and End-to-End (E2E) schemes. We employ Wav2Vec2-XLS-R models on custom pseudo-annotated datasets and investigate several architectures for the adaptability of cross-lingual systems. Our results demonstrate that End-to-End spoken NER outperforms pipeline-based alternatives over our limited annotations. Notably, transfer learning from German to Dutch surpasses the Dutch E2E system by 7% and the Dutch pipeline system by 4%. This study not only underscores the feasibility of transfer learning in spoken NER but also sets promising outcomes for future evaluations, hinting at the need for comprehensive data collection to augment the results

Essential Speech and Language Technology for Dutch: Results by the STEVIN-programme

Computational Linguistics; Germanic Languages; Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics); Computing Methodologie

Noise or music? Investigating the usefulness of normalisation for robust sentiment analysis on social media data

In the past decade, sentiment analysis research has thrived, especially on social media. While this data genre is suitable to extract opinions and sentiment, it is known to be noisy. Complex normalisation methods have been developed to transform noisy text into its standard form, but their effect on tasks like sentiment analysis remains underinvestigated. Sentiment analysis approaches mostly include spell checking or rule-based normalisation as preprocess- ing and rarely investigate its impact on the task performance. We present an optimised sentiment classifier and investigate to what extent its performance can be enhanced by integrating SMT-based normalisation as preprocessing. Experiments on a test set comprising a variety of user-generated content genres revealed that normalisation improves sentiment classification performance on tweets and blog posts, showing the model’s ability to generalise to other data genres