Comparative analysis between a respeaking captioning system and a captioning system without human intervention

People living with deafness or hearing impairment have limited access to information broadcast live on television. Live closed captioning is a currently active area of study; to our knowledge, there is no system developed thus far that produces high-quality captioning results without using scripts or human interaction. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the quality of captions generated for four Spanish news programs by two captioning systems: a semiautomatic system based on respeaking (system currently used by a Spanish TV station) and an automatic system without human interaction proposed and developed by the authors. The analysis is conducted by measuring and comparing the accuracy, latency and speed of the captions generated by both captioning systems. The captions generated by the system presented higher quality considering the accuracy in terms of Word Error Rate (WER between 3.76 and 7.29%) and latency of the captions (approximately 4 s) at an acceptable speed to access the information. We contribute a first study focused on the development and analysis of an automatic captioning system without human intervention with promising quality results. These results reinforce the importance of continuing to study these automatic systems

Speech technologies for the audiovisual and multimedia interaction environments

361 p

Sub-Sync: automatic synchronization of subtitles in the broadcasting of true live programs in spanish

Individuals With Sensory Impairment (Hearing Or Visual) Encounter Serious Communication Barriers Within Society And The World Around Them. These Barriers Hinder The Communication Process And Make Access To Information An Obstacle They Must Overcome On A Daily Basis. In This Context, One Of The Most Common Complaints Made By The Television (Tv) Users With Sensory Impairment Is The Lack Of Synchronism Between Audio And Subtitles In Some Types Of Programs. In Addition, Synchronization Remains One Of The Most Significant Factors In Audience Perception Of Quality In Live-Originated Tv Subtitles For The Deaf And Hard Of Hearing. This Paper Introduces The Sub-Sync Framework Intended For Use In Automatic Synchronization Of Audio-Visual Contents And Subtitles, Taking Advantage Of Current Well-Known Techniques Used In Symbol Sequences Alignment. In This Particular Case, These Symbol Sequences Are The Subtitles Produced By The Broadcaster Subtitling System And The Word Flow Generated By An Automatic Speech Recognizing The Procedure. The Goal Of Sub-Sync Is To Address The Lack Of Synchronism That Occurs In The Subtitles When Produced During The Broadcast Of Live Tv Programs Or Other Programs That Have Some Improvised Parts. Furthermore, It Also Aims To Resolve The Problematic Interphase Of Synchronized And Unsynchronized Parts Of Mixed Type Programs. In Addition, The Framework Is Able To Synchronize The Subtitles Even When They Do Not Correspond Literally To The Original Audio And/Or The Audio Cannot Be Completely Transcribed By An Automatic Process. Sub-Sync Has Been Successfully Tested In Different Live Broadcasts, Including Mixed Programs, In Which The Synchronized Parts (Recorded, Scripted) Are Interspersed With Desynchronized (Improvised) Ones

Diversity and public television: analysis of subtitling as an accessibility service

The present article addresses media pluralism from a critical perspective, as a guarantor of attention to social and cultural diversity. The study focuses on deaf individuals, and an analysis is conducted of subtitles as one of the services that guarantees universal access to the contents offered by Spanish Radio and Television (Radiotelevisión Española, RTVE) for social and cultural diversity. Likewise, given the changes in audiovisual consumption in the form of streaming, and the rise of on-demand content, an analysis is not only performed of linear television, but also of live online and on-demand content. For this, a quantitative analysis was performed of a random sample of more than 5000 RTVE programs (2017-2018), to establish the number of subtitled programs for deaf individuals, their schedule, and the types of contents that included this service. Also, a qualitative analysis was performed on a sample of 72 programs distributed among the different channels belonging to this public corporation. Lastly, to evaluate the quality and suitability of the subtitles, an online survey was provided, which was completed by 183 deaf individuals who were users of the RTVE subtitles. Through this combination of methods, we were able to analyze and evaluate the cultural pluralism of RTVE through the subtitles provided for the deaf, associating it with the defense of the fundamental right of freedom of expression and social inclusion, values that must be guaranteed in democratic societies

Impact of automatic segmentation on the quality, productivity and self-reported post-editing effort of intralingual subtitles

This paper describes the evaluation methodology followed to measure the impact of using a machine learning algorithm to automatically segment intralingual subtitles. The segmentation quality, productivity and self-reported post-editing effort achieved with such approach are shown to improve those obtained by the technique based in counting characters, mainly employed for automatic subtitle segmentation currently. The corpus used to train and test the proposed automated segmentation method is also described and shared with the community, in order to foster further research in this are

The present and future of audio description and subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing in Spain

The aim of this article is to describe the state of the art in Spain of the two most popular media accessible modalities: audio description and subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing. The article traces their origin and development up to the present time. It also examines standards and laws and analyses the economic and operative implications of media accessibility, which does not follow traditional economic parameters. The article aims to define the profile of future describers and subtitlers in Spain, who are currently being trained in the field of Audiovisual Translation. It concludes by proposing a wide variety of measures to be taken in order to reach full media accessibility and raise popular awareness of these services which are available now and will be increasingly so in the future with the change from analogous to digital broadcastingLe présent article vise à faire le point sur les deux modes d'accessibilité aux médias les plus importants en Espagne : l'audiodescription et le sous-titrage pour sourds et malentendants. Il se reporte à l'origine de ces techniques, suit leur développement jusqu'à l'époque actuelle et examine les normes et les lois qui les régissent. Il propose une analyse des implications économiques et fonctionnelles de l'accessibilité aux médias, laquelle n'est pas gouvernée par les paramètres économiques conventionnels. Il aborde la détermination du profil des futurs professionnels du sous-titrage et de l'audiodescription en Espagne, qui sont formés dans le cadre de la traduction audiovisuelle. L'article se conclut par la proposition d'un éventail de mesures à prendre pour faire connaître ces services à un large public et pour atteindre une totale accessibilité, laquelle sera favorisée par le remplacement de la diffusion analogique par la radio et la télévision numérique

Monitoring Accessibility Services in Digital Television

This paper addresses methodology and tools applied to the monitoring of accessibility services in digital television at a time when the principles of accessibility and design are being considered in all new audiovisual media communication services. The main objective of this research is to measure the quality and quantity of existing accessibility services offered by digital terrestrial television (DTT). The preliminary results, presented here, offer the development of a prototype for automatic monitoring and a methodology for obtaining quality measurements, along with the conclusions drawn by initial studies carried out in Spain. The recent approval of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities gives special relevance to this research because it provides valuable guidelines to help set the priorities to improve services currently available to users.This research work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade (Avanza I+D programme) and The Spanish Centre of Captioning and Audio DescriptionPublicad

Deep-Sync: A novel deep learning-based tool for semantic-aware subtitling synchronisation

Subtitles are a key element to make any media content accessible for people who suffer from hearing impairment and for elderly people, but also useful when watching TV in a noisy environment or learning new languages. Most of the time, subtitles are generated manually in advance, building a verbatim and synchronised transcription of the audio. However, in TV live broadcasts, captions are created in real time by a re-speaker with the help of a voice recognition software, which inevitability leads to delays and lack of synchronisation. In this paper, we present Deep-Sync, a tool for the alignment of subtitles with the audio-visual content. The architecture integrates a deep language representation model and a real-time voice recognition software to build a semantic-aware alignment tool that successfully aligns most of the subtitles even when there is no direct correspondence between the re-speaker and the audio content. In order to avoid any kind of censorship, Deep-Sync can be deployed directly on users' TVs causing a small delay to perform the alignment, but avoiding to delay the signal at the broadcaster station. Deep-Sync was compared with other subtitles alignment tool, showing that our proposal is able to improve the synchronisation in all tested cases.This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education under TIN2017-85727-C4-3-P grant (DeepBio) and Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid under S2018/TCS-4566 grant (CYNAMON). We gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of the Titan V GPU used for this research

The Reception of Spain in Australia through Translation: a Linguistic, Cultural and Audiovisual Overview

The geographical distance between Spain and Australia is not an obstacle to a historical relationship that is developing at linguistic, cultural and audiovisual levels in Australia. This work presents a study of the position of the Spanish language and culture in the Australian social panorama and reflects on the audiovisual media as the main means of conveying this foreign culture and language. From the identification of the elements that participate in the process of translation of the Spanish audiovisual products in Australia, significant conclusions are derived related to the effect that the translation of these audiovisual products can have on the creation of a Spanish cultural image in Australia.La distancia geográfica entre España y Australia no es óbice para una relación histórica que en los planos lingüístico, cultural y audiovisual está en pleno desarrollo a día de hoy en tierras australianas. En este trabajo se presenta un estudio de la posición que ocupan la lengua y la cultura españolas en el panorama social australiano y se reflexiona sobre el medio audiovisual como principal transmisor de esta cultura y de esta lengua foráneas. A partir de la identificación de los elementos que participan en el proceso de traducción de los productos audiovisuales españoles en Australia se derivan conclusiones significativas relacionadas con el efecto que puede tener la traducción de estos productos audiovisuales en la creación de una imagen cultural española en Australia