1,462 research outputs found
Tools for Collecting Speech Corpora via Mechanical-Turk
To rapidly port speech applications to new languages one of the most difficult tasks is the initial collection of sufficient speech corpora. State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition systems are typical trained on hundreds of hours of speech data. While pre-existing corpora do exist for major languages, a sufficient amount of quality speech data is not available for most world languages. While previous works have focused on the collection of translations and the transcription of audio via Mechanical-Turk mechanisms, in this paper we introduce two tools which enable the collection of speech data remotely. We then compare the quality of audio collected from paid part-time staff and unsupervised volunteers, and determine that basic user training is critical to obtain usable data
Creating a data collection for evaluating rich speech retrieval
We describe the development of a test collection for the investigation of speech retrieval beyond identification of relevant content. This collection focuses on satisfying user information needs for queries associated with specific types of speech acts. The collection is based on an archive of the Internet video from Internet video sharing platform (blip.tv), and was provided by the MediaEval benchmarking initiative. A crowdsourcing approach was used to identify segments in the video data which contain speech acts, to create a description of the video containing the act and to generate search queries designed to refind this speech act. We describe and reflect on our experiences with crowdsourcing this test collection using the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. We highlight the challenges of constructing this dataset, including the selection of the data source, design of the crowdsouring task and the specification of queries and relevant items
An introduction to crowdsourcing for language and multimedia technology research
Language and multimedia technology research often relies on
large manually constructed datasets for training or evaluation of algorithms and systems. Constructing these datasets is often expensive with significant challenges in terms of recruitment of personnel to carry out the work. Crowdsourcing methods using scalable pools of workers available on-demand offers a flexible means of rapid low-cost construction of many of these datasets to support existing research requirements and potentially promote new research initiatives that would otherwise not be possible
Translation crowdsourcing: creating a multilingual corpus of online educational content
The present work describes a multilingual corpus of online content in the educational domain, i.e. Massive Open Online Course
material, ranging from course forum text to subtitles of online video lectures, that has been developed via large-scale crowdsourcing.
The English source text is manually translated into 11 European and BRIC languages using the CrowdFlower platform. During the
process several challenges arose which mainly involved the in-domain text genre, the large text volume, the idiosyncrasies of each
target language, the limitations of the crowdsourcing platform, as well as the quality assurance and workflow issues of the
crowdsourcing process. The corpus constitutes a product of the EU-funded TraMOOC project and is utilised in the project in order to
train, tune and test machine translation engines
Data Cleaning for XML Electronic Dictionaries via Statistical Anomaly Detection
Many important forms of data are stored digitally in XML format. Errors can
occur in the textual content of the data in the fields of the XML. Fixing these
errors manually is time-consuming and expensive, especially for large amounts
of data. There is increasing interest in the research, development, and use of
automated techniques for assisting with data cleaning. Electronic dictionaries
are an important form of data frequently stored in XML format that frequently
have errors introduced through a mixture of manual typographical entry errors
and optical character recognition errors. In this paper we describe methods for
flagging statistical anomalies as likely errors in electronic dictionaries
stored in XML format. We describe six systems based on different sources of
information. The systems detect errors using various signals in the data
including uncommon characters, text length, character-based language models,
word-based language models, tied-field length ratios, and tied-field
transliteration models. Four of the systems detect errors based on expectations
automatically inferred from content within elements of a single field type. We
call these single-field systems. Two of the systems detect errors based on
correspondence expectations automatically inferred from content within elements
of multiple related field types. We call these tied-field systems. For each
system, we provide an intuitive analysis of the type of error that it is
successful at detecting. Finally, we describe two larger-scale evaluations
using crowdsourcing with Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform and using the
annotations of a domain expert. The evaluations consistently show that the
systems are useful for improving the efficiency with which errors in XML
electronic dictionaries can be detected.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 5 tables; published in Proceedings of the 2016
IEEE Tenth International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), Laguna
Hills, CA, USA, pages 79-86, February 201
Crowdsourcing for Speech: Economic, Legal and Ethical analysis
With respect to spoken language resource production, Crowdsourcing - the process of distributing tasks to an open, unspecified population via the internet - offers a wide range of opportunities: populations with specific skills are potentially instantaneously accessible somewhere on the globe for any spoken language. As is the case for most newly introduced high-tech services, crowdsourcing raises both hopes and doubts, certainties and questions. A general analysis of Crowdsourcing for Speech processing could be found in (Eskenazi et al., 2013). This article will focus on ethical, legal and economic issues of crowdsourcing in general (Zittrain, 2008a) and of crowdsourcing services such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (Fort et al., 2011; Adda et al., 2011), a major platform for multilingual language resources (LR) production
Final FLaReNet deliverable: Language Resources for the Future - The Future of Language Resources
Language Technologies (LT), together with their backbone, Language Resources (LR), provide an essential support to the challenge of Multilingualism and ICT of the future. The main task of language technologies is to bridge language barriers and to help creating a new environment where information flows smoothly across frontiers and languages, no matter the country, and the language, of origin. To achieve this goal, all players involved need to act as a community able to join forces on a set of shared priorities. However, until now the field of Language Resources and Technology has long suffered from an excess of individuality and fragmentation, with a lack of coherence concerning the priorities for the field, the direction to move, not to mention a common timeframe. The context encountered by the FLaReNet project was thus represented by an active field needing a coherence that can only be given by sharing common priorities and endeavours. FLaReNet has contributed to the creation of this coherence by gathering a wide community of experts and making them participate in the definition of an exhaustive set of recommendations
What's Cookin'? Interpreting Cooking Videos using Text, Speech and Vision
We present a novel method for aligning a sequence of instructions to a video
of someone carrying out a task. In particular, we focus on the cooking domain,
where the instructions correspond to the recipe. Our technique relies on an HMM
to align the recipe steps to the (automatically generated) speech transcript.
We then refine this alignment using a state-of-the-art visual food detector,
based on a deep convolutional neural network. We show that our technique
outperforms simpler techniques based on keyword spotting. It also enables
interesting applications, such as automatically illustrating recipes with
keyframes, and searching within a video for events of interest.Comment: To appear in NAACL 201
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