Spoken term detection ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation: overview, systems, results, and discussion

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13636-015-0063-8Spoken term detection (STD) aims at retrieving data from a speech repository given a textual representation of the search term. Nowadays, it is receiving much interest due to the large volume of multimedia information. STD differs from automatic speech recognition (ASR) in that ASR is interested in all the terms/words that appear in the speech data, whereas STD focuses on a selected list of search terms that must be detected within the speech data. This paper presents the systems submitted to the STD ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation, held as a part of the ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation campaign within the context of the IberSPEECH 2014 conference. This is the first STD evaluation that deals with Spanish language. The evaluation consists of retrieving the speech files that contain the search terms, indicating their start and end times within the appropriate speech file, along with a score value that reflects the confidence given to the detection of the search term. The evaluation is conducted on a Spanish spontaneous speech database, which comprises a set of talks from workshops and amounts to about 7 h of speech. We present the database, the evaluation metrics, the systems submitted to the evaluation, the results, and a detailed discussion. Four different research groups took part in the evaluation. Evaluation results show reasonable performance for moderate out-of-vocabulary term rate. This paper compares the systems submitted to the evaluation and makes a deep analysis based on some search term properties (term length, in-vocabulary/out-of-vocabulary terms, single-word/multi-word terms, and in-language/foreign terms).This work has been partly supported by project CMC-V2 (TEC2012-37585-C02-01) from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. This research was also funded by the European Regional Development Fund, the Galician Regional Government (GRC2014/024, “Consolidation of Research Units: AtlantTIC Project” CN2012/160)

Automatic speech recognition of Cantonese-English code-mixing utterances.

Chan Yeuk Chi Joyce.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005.Includes bibliographical references.Abstracts in English and Chinese.Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Background --- p.1Chapter 1.2 --- Previous Work on Code-switching Speech Recognition --- p.2Chapter 1.2.1 --- Keyword Spotting Approach --- p.3Chapter 1.2.2 --- Translation Approach --- p.4Chapter 1.2.3 --- Language Boundary Detection --- p.6Chapter 1.3 --- Motivations of Our Work --- p.7Chapter 1.4 --- Methodology --- p.8Chapter 1.5 --- Thesis Outline --- p.10Chapter 1.6 --- References --- p.11Chapter Chapter 2 --- Fundamentals of Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition for Cantonese and English --- p.14Chapter 2.1 --- Basic Theory of Speech Recognition --- p.14Chapter 2.1.1 --- Feature Extraction --- p.14Chapter 2.1.2 --- Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) Probability --- p.15Chapter 2.1.3 --- Hidden Markov Model (HMM) --- p.16Chapter 2.1.4 --- Statistical Language Modeling --- p.17Chapter 2.1.5 --- Search A lgorithm --- p.18Chapter 2.2 --- Word Posterior Probability (WPP) --- p.19Chapter 2.3 --- Generalized Word Posterior Probability (GWPP) --- p.23Chapter 2.4 --- Characteristics of Cantonese --- p.24Chapter 2.4.1 --- Cantonese Phonology --- p.24Chapter 2.4.2 --- Variation and Change in Pronunciation --- p.27Chapter 2.4.3 --- Syllables and Characters in Cantonese --- p.28Chapter 2.4.4 --- Spoken Cantonese vs. Written Chinese --- p.28Chapter 2.5 --- Characteristics of English --- p.30Chapter 2.5.1 --- English Phonology --- p.30Chapter 2.5.2 --- English with Cantonese Accents --- p.31Chapter 2.6 --- References --- p.32Chapter Chapter 3 --- Code-mixing and Code-switching Speech Recognition --- p.35Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.35Chapter 3.2 --- Definition --- p.35Chapter 3.2.1 --- Monolingual Speech Recognition --- p.35Chapter 3.2.2 --- Multilingual Speech Recognition --- p.35Chapter 3.2.3 --- Code-mixing and Code-switching --- p.36Chapter 3.3 --- Conversation in Hong Kong --- p.38Chapter 3.3.1 --- Language Choice of Hong Kong People --- p.38Chapter 3.3.2 --- Reasons for Code-mixing in Hong Kong --- p.40Chapter 3.3.3 --- How Does Code-mixing Occur? --- p.41Chapter 3.4 --- Difficulties for Code-mixing - Specific to Cantonese-English --- p.44Chapter 3.4.1 --- Phonetic Differences --- p.45Chapter 3.4.2 --- Phonology difference --- p.48Chapter 3.4.3 --- Accent and Borrowing --- p.49Chapter 3.4.4 --- Lexicon and Grammar --- p.49Chapter 3.4.5 --- Lack of Appropriate Speech Corpus --- p.50Chapter 3.5 --- References --- p.50Chapter Chapter 4 --- Data Collection --- p.53Chapter 4.1 --- Data Collection --- p.53Chapter 4.1.1 --- Corpus Design --- p.53Chapter 4.1.2 --- Recording Setup --- p.59Chapter 4.1.3 --- Post-processing of Speech Data --- p.60Chapter 4.2 --- A Baseline Database --- p.61Chapter 4.2.1 --- Monolingual Spoken Cantonese Speech Data (CUMIX) --- p.61Chapter 4.3 --- References --- p.61Chapter Chapter 5 --- System Design and Experimental Setup --- p.63Chapter 5.1 --- Overview of the Code-mixing Speech Recognizer --- p.63Chapter 5.1.1 --- Bilingual Syllable / Word-based Speech Recognizer --- p.63Chapter 5.1.2 --- Language Boundary Detection --- p.64Chapter 5.1.3 --- Generalized Word Posterior Probability (GWPP) --- p.65Chapter 5.2 --- Acoustic Modeling --- p.66Chapter 5.2.1 --- Speech Corpus for Training of Acoustic Models --- p.67Chapter 5.2.2 --- Features Extraction --- p.69Chapter 5.2.3 --- Variability in the Speech Signal --- p.69Chapter 5.2.4 --- Language Dependency of the Acoustic Models --- p.71Chapter 5.2.5 --- Pronunciation Dictionary --- p.80Chapter 5.2.6 --- The Training Process of Acoustic Models --- p.83Chapter 5.2.7 --- Decoding and Evaluation --- p.88Chapter 5.3 --- Language Modeling --- p.90Chapter 5.3.1 --- N-gram Language Model --- p.91Chapter 5.3.2 --- Difficulties in Data Collection --- p.91Chapter 5.3.3 --- Text Data for Training Language Model --- p.92Chapter 5.3.4 --- Training Tools --- p.95Chapter 5.3.5 --- Training Procedure --- p.95Chapter 5.3.6 --- Evaluation of the Language Models --- p.98Chapter 5.4 --- Language Boundary Detection --- p.99Chapter 5.4.1 --- Phone-based LBD --- p.100Chapter 5.4.2 --- Syllable-based LBD --- p.104Chapter 5.4.3 --- LBD Based on Syllable Lattice --- p.106Chapter 5.5 --- "Integration of the Acoustic Model Scores, Language Model Scores and Language Boundary Information" --- p.107Chapter 5.5.1 --- Integration of Acoustic Model Scores and Language Boundary Information. --- p.107Chapter 5.5.2 --- Integration of Modified Acoustic Model Scores and Language Model Scores --- p.109Chapter 5.5.3 --- Evaluation Criterion --- p.111Chapter 5.6 --- References --- p.112Chapter Chapter 6 --- Results and Analysis --- p.118Chapter 6.1 --- Speech Data for Development and Evaluation --- p.118Chapter 6.1.1 --- Development Data --- p.118Chapter 6.1.2 --- Testing Data --- p.118Chapter 6.2 --- Performance of Different Acoustic Units --- p.119Chapter 6.2.1 --- Analysis of Results --- p.120Chapter 6.3 --- Language Boundary Detection --- p.122Chapter 6.3.1 --- Phone-based Language Boundary Detection --- p.123Chapter 6.3.2 --- Syllable-based Language Boundary Detection (SYL LB) --- p.127Chapter 6.3.3 --- Language Boundary Detection Based on Syllable Lattice (BILINGUAL LBD) --- p.129Chapter 6.3.4 --- Observations --- p.129Chapter 6.4 --- Evaluation of the Language Models --- p.130Chapter 6.4.1 --- Character Perplexity --- p.130Chapter 6.4.2 --- Phonetic-to-text Conversion Rate --- p.131Chapter 6.4.3 --- Observations --- p.131Chapter 6.5 --- Character Error Rate --- p.132Chapter 6.5.1 --- Without Language Boundary Information --- p.133Chapter 6.5.2 --- With Language Boundary Detector SYL LBD --- p.134Chapter 6.5.3 --- With Language Boundary Detector BILINGUAL-LBD --- p.136Chapter 6.5.4 --- Observations --- p.138Chapter 6.6 --- References --- p.141Chapter Chapter 7 --- Conclusions and Suggestions for Future Work --- p.143Chapter 7.1 --- Conclusion --- p.143Chapter 7.1.1 --- Difficulties and Solutions --- p.144Chapter 7.2 --- Suggestions for Future Work --- p.149Chapter 7.2.1 --- Acoustic Modeling --- p.149Chapter 7.2.2 --- Pronunciation Modeling --- p.149Chapter 7.2.3 --- Language Modeling --- p.150Chapter 7.2.4 --- Speech Data --- p.150Chapter 7.2.5 --- Language Boundary Detection --- p.151Chapter 7.3 --- References --- p.151Appendix A Code-mixing Utterances in Training Set of CUMIX --- p.152Appendix B Code-mixing Utterances in Testing Set of CUMIX --- p.175Appendix C Usage of Speech Data in CUMIX --- p.20

Advances and trends in automatic speech recognition

This paper aimts at giving an overview of récent advances in the domain of Speech Recognition . The paper mainly focttses on Speech Recognition, but also mentions some progress in other areas of Speech Processing (spea er recognition, speech synthesis, speech analysis and coding) using similar methodologies. It first gives a view of what the problems related to aulomatic speech processing are, and then describes the initial approaches that have been followed in order to address Chose problems . It then introduces thé methodological novelties that allowed for progress along three axes : from isolated-word recognition to continuous speech, from spea er-dependent recognition to spea er-independent, and from small vocabularies to large rocabularies. Special emphasis centers on tlie improvements made possible by Mar ov Models . and, more recently, hy Connectionist Models, resulting in progress simultaneously obtained along the above différent axes, in improved performance for difficult vocabularies, or in more robust systems . Some specialised hardware is also described, as well as the efforts aimed ai assessing Speech Recognition systems.Le but de cet article est de donner un aperçu des progrès récents obtenus dans le domaine de la reconnaissance automatique de la parole . Il traite essentiellement de la reconnaissance vocale, mais mentionne également les progrès réalisés dans d'autres domaines du Traitement Automatique de la Parole (Reconnaissance du Locuteur, Synthèse de Parole . Analyse et Codage), qui utilisent des méthodes voisines. Ensuite, sont introduites les nouveautés méthodologiques qui ont permis des progrès suivant trois axes : des mots isolés vers la parole continue, de la reconnaissance monolocuteur vers la reconnaissance multilocuteur, et des petits vocabulaires vers les grands vocabulaires . Une mention spéciale est accordée aux améliorations qui ont été rendues possibles par les Modèles Mar oviens, et, plus récemment, par les Modèles Connexionnistes . Ces méthodes ont conduit à des progrès obtenus concurremment suivant plusieurs axes, à des performances meilleures sur les vocabulaires difficiles, ou à des systèmes plus robustes . Quelques matériels spécialisés sont également décrits, ainsi que les efforts qui ont été consentis dans le but d'évaluer la qualité des systèmes de reconnaissanc

Human-competitive automatic topic indexing

Topic indexing is the task of identifying the main topics covered by a document. These are useful for many purposes: as subject headings in libraries, as keywords in academic publications and as tags on the web. Knowing a document's topics helps people judge its relevance quickly. However, assigning topics manually is labor intensive. This thesis shows how to generate them automatically in a way that competes with human performance. Three kinds of indexing are investigated: term assignment, a task commonly performed by librarians, who select topics from a controlled vocabulary; tagging, a popular activity of web users, who choose topics freely; and a new method of keyphrase extraction, where topics are equated to Wikipedia article names. A general two-stage algorithm is introduced that first selects candidate topics and then ranks them by significance based on their properties. These properties draw on statistical, semantic, domain-specific and encyclopedic knowledge. They are combined using a machine learning algorithm that models human indexing behavior from examples. This approach is evaluated by comparing automatically generated topics to those assigned by professional indexers, and by amateurs. We claim that the algorithm is human-competitive because it chooses topics that are as consistent with those assigned by humans as their topics are with each other. The approach is generalizable, requires little training data and applies across different domains and languages