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

The Microsoft 2017 Conversational Speech Recognition System

We describe the 2017 version of Microsoft's conversational speech recognition system, in which we update our 2016 system with recent developments in neural-network-based acoustic and language modeling to further advance the state of the art on the Switchboard speech recognition task. The system adds a CNN-BLSTM acoustic model to the set of model architectures we combined previously, and includes character-based and dialog session aware LSTM language models in rescoring. For system combination we adopt a two-stage approach, whereby subsets of acoustic models are first combined at the senone/frame level, followed by a word-level voting via confusion networks. We also added a confusion network rescoring step after system combination. The resulting system yields a 5.1\% word error rate on the 2000 Switchboard evaluation set

PRESENCE: A human-inspired architecture for speech-based human-machine interaction

Recent years have seen steady improvements in the quality and performance of speech-based human-machine interaction driven by a significant convergence in the methods and techniques employed. However, the quantity of training data required to improve state-of-the-art systems seems to be growing exponentially and performance appears to be asymptotic to a level that may be inadequate for many real-world applications. This suggests that there may be a fundamental flaw in the underlying architecture of contemporary systems, as well as a failure to capitalize on the combinatorial properties of human spoken language. This paper addresses these issues and presents a novel architecture for speech-based human-machine interaction inspired by recent findings in the neurobiology of living systems. Called PRESENCE-"PREdictive SENsorimotor Control and Emulation" - this new architecture blurs the distinction between the core components of a traditional spoken language dialogue system and instead focuses on a recursive hierarchical feedback control structure. Cooperative and communicative behavior emerges as a by-product of an architecture that is founded on a model of interaction in which the system has in mind the needs and intentions of a user and a user has in mind the needs and intentions of the system

Automatic transcription and phonetic labelling of dyslexic children's reading in Bahasa Melayu

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is potentially helpful for children who suffer from dyslexia. Highly phonetically similar errors of dyslexic children‟s reading affect the accuracy of ASR. Thus, this study aims to evaluate acceptable accuracy of ASR using automatic transcription and phonetic labelling of dyslexic children‟s reading in BM. For that, three objectives have been set: first to produce manual transcription and phonetic labelling; second to construct automatic transcription and phonetic labelling using forced alignment; and third to compare between accuracy using automatic transcription and phonetic labelling and manual transcription and phonetic labelling. Therefore, to accomplish these goals methods have been used including manual speech labelling and segmentation, forced alignment, Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for training, and for measure accuracy of ASR, Word Error Rate (WER) and False Alarm Rate (FAR) were used. A number of 585 speech files are used for manual transcription, forced alignment and training experiment. The recognition ASR engine using automatic transcription and phonetic labelling obtained optimum results is 76.04% with WER as low as 23.96% and FAR is 17.9%. These results are almost similar with ASR engine using manual transcription namely 76.26%, WER as low as 23.97% and FAR a 17.9%. As conclusion, the accuracy of automatic transcription and phonetic labelling is acceptable to use it for help dyslexic children learning using ASR in Bahasa Melayu (BM