CONTRIBUTIONS TO EFFICIENT AUTOMATIC TRANSCRIPTION OF VIDEO LECTURES

Tesis por compendio[ES] Durante los últimos años, los repositorios multimedia en línea se han convertido en fuentes clave de conocimiento gracias al auge de Internet, especialmente en el área de la educación. Instituciones educativas de todo el mundo han dedicado muchos recursos en la búsqueda de nuevos métodos de enseñanza, tanto para mejorar la asimilación de nuevos conocimientos, como para poder llegar a una audiencia más amplia. Como resultado, hoy en día disponemos de diferentes repositorios con clases grabadas que siven como herramientas complementarias en la enseñanza, o incluso pueden asentar una nueva base en la enseñanza a distancia. Sin embargo, deben cumplir con una serie de requisitos para que la experiencia sea totalmente satisfactoria y es aquí donde la transcripción de los materiales juega un papel fundamental. La transcripción posibilita una búsqueda precisa de los materiales en los que el alumno está interesado, se abre la puerta a la traducción automática, a funciones de recomendación, a la generación de resumenes de las charlas y además, el poder hacer llegar el contenido a personas con discapacidades auditivas. No obstante, la generación de estas transcripciones puede resultar muy costosa. Con todo esto en mente, la presente tesis tiene como objetivo proporcionar nuevas herramientas y técnicas que faciliten la transcripción de estos repositorios. En particular, abordamos el desarrollo de un conjunto de herramientas de reconocimiento de automático del habla, con énfasis en las técnicas de aprendizaje profundo que contribuyen a proporcionar transcripciones precisas en casos de estudio reales. Además, se presentan diferentes participaciones en competiciones internacionales donde se demuestra la competitividad del software comparada con otras soluciones. Por otra parte, en aras de mejorar los sistemas de reconocimiento, se propone una nueva técnica de adaptación de estos sistemas al interlocutor basada en el uso Medidas de Confianza. Esto además motivó el desarrollo de técnicas para la mejora en la estimación de este tipo de medidas por medio de Redes Neuronales Recurrentes. Todas las contribuciones presentadas se han probado en diferentes repositorios educativos. De hecho, el toolkit transLectures-UPV es parte de un conjunto de herramientas que sirve para generar transcripciones de clases en diferentes universidades e instituciones españolas y europeas.[CA] Durant els últims anys, els repositoris multimèdia en línia s'han convertit en fonts clau de coneixement gràcies a l'expansió d'Internet, especialment en l'àrea de l'educació. Institucions educatives de tot el món han dedicat molts recursos en la recerca de nous mètodes d'ensenyament, tant per millorar l'assimilació de nous coneixements, com per poder arribar a una audiència més àmplia. Com a resultat, avui dia disposem de diferents repositoris amb classes gravades que serveixen com a eines complementàries en l'ensenyament, o fins i tot poden assentar una nova base a l'ensenyament a distància. No obstant això, han de complir amb una sèrie de requisits perquè la experiència siga totalment satisfactòria i és ací on la transcripció dels materials juga un paper fonamental. La transcripció possibilita una recerca precisa dels materials en els quals l'alumne està interessat, s'obri la porta a la traducció automàtica, a funcions de recomanació, a la generació de resums de les xerrades i el poder fer arribar el contingut a persones amb discapacitats auditives. No obstant, la generació d'aquestes transcripcions pot resultar molt costosa. Amb això en ment, la present tesi té com a objectiu proporcionar noves eines i tècniques que faciliten la transcripció d'aquests repositoris. En particular, abordem el desenvolupament d'un conjunt d'eines de reconeixement automàtic de la parla, amb èmfasi en les tècniques d'aprenentatge profund que contribueixen a proporcionar transcripcions precises en casos d'estudi reals. A més, es presenten diferents participacions en competicions internacionals on es demostra la competitivitat del programari comparada amb altres solucions. D'altra banda, per tal de millorar els sistemes de reconeixement, es proposa una nova tècnica d'adaptació d'aquests sistemes a l'interlocutor basada en l'ús de Mesures de Confiança. A més, això va motivar el desenvolupament de tècniques per a la millora en l'estimació d'aquest tipus de mesures per mitjà de Xarxes Neuronals Recurrents. Totes les contribucions presentades s'han provat en diferents repositoris educatius. De fet, el toolkit transLectures-UPV és part d'un conjunt d'eines que serveix per generar transcripcions de classes en diferents universitats i institucions espanyoles i europees.[EN] During the last years, on-line multimedia repositories have become key knowledge assets thanks to the rise of Internet and especially in the area of education. Educational institutions around the world have devoted big efforts to explore different teaching methods, to improve the transmission of knowledge and to reach a wider audience. As a result, online video lecture repositories are now available and serve as complementary tools that can boost the learning experience to better assimilate new concepts. In order to guarantee the success of these repositories the transcription of each lecture plays a very important role because it constitutes the first step towards the availability of many other features. This transcription allows the searchability of learning materials, enables the translation into another languages, provides recommendation functions, gives the possibility to provide content summaries, guarantees the access to people with hearing disabilities, etc. However, the transcription of these videos is expensive in terms of time and human cost. To this purpose, this thesis aims at providing new tools and techniques that ease the transcription of these repositories. In particular, we address the development of a complete Automatic Speech Recognition Toolkit with an special focus on the Deep Learning techniques that contribute to provide accurate transcriptions in real-world scenarios. This toolkit is tested against many other in different international competitions showing comparable transcription quality. Moreover, a new technique to improve the recognition accuracy has been proposed which makes use of Confidence Measures, and constitutes the spark that motivated the proposal of new Confidence Measures techniques that helped to further improve the transcription quality. To this end, a new speaker-adapted confidence measure approach was proposed for models based on Recurrent Neural Networks. The contributions proposed herein have been tested in real-life scenarios in different educational repositories. In fact, the transLectures-UPV toolkit is part of a set of tools for providing video lecture transcriptions in many different Spanish and European universities and institutions.Agua Teba, MÁD. (2019). CONTRIBUTIONS TO EFFICIENT AUTOMATIC TRANSCRIPTION OF VIDEO LECTURES [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/130198TESISCompendi

Automatic Quality Estimation for ASR System Combination

Recognizer Output Voting Error Reduction (ROVER) has been widely used for system combination in automatic speech recognition (ASR). In order to select the most appropriate words to insert at each position in the output transcriptions, some ROVER extensions rely on critical information such as confidence scores and other ASR decoder features. This information, which is not always available, highly depends on the decoding process and sometimes tends to over estimate the real quality of the recognized words. In this paper we propose a novel variant of ROVER that takes advantage of ASR quality estimation (QE) for ranking the transcriptions at "segment level" instead of: i) relying on confidence scores, or ii) feeding ROVER with randomly ordered hypotheses. We first introduce an effective set of features to compensate for the absence of ASR decoder information. Then, we apply QE techniques to perform accurate hypothesis ranking at segment-level before starting the fusion process. The evaluation is carried out on two different tasks, in which we respectively combine hypotheses coming from independent ASR systems and multi-microphone recordings. In both tasks, it is assumed that the ASR decoder information is not available. The proposed approach significantly outperforms standard ROVER and it is competitive with two strong oracles that e xploit prior knowledge about the real quality of the hypotheses to be combined. Compared to standard ROVER, the abs olute WER improvements in the two evaluation scenarios range from 0.5% to 7.3%

Building task-oriented machine translation systems

La principal meta de esta tesis es desarrollar sistemas de traduccion interactiva que presenten mayor sinergia con sus usuarios potenciales. Por ello, el objetivo es hacer los sistemas estado del arte mas ergonomicos, intuitivos y eficientes, con el fin de que el experto humano se sienta mas comodo al utilizarlos. Con este fin se presentan diferentes t�ecnicas enfocadas a mejorar la adaptabilidad y el tiempo de respuesta de los sistemas de traduccion automatica subyacentes, as�ÿ como tambien se presenta una estrategia cuya finalidad es mejorar la interaccion hombre-m�aquina. Todo ello con el proposito ultimo de rellenar el hueco existente entre el estado del arte en traduccion automatica y las herramientas que los traductores humanos tienen a su disposici�on. En lo que respecta al tiempo de respuesta de los sistemas de traducci�on autom�atica, en esta tesis se presenta una t�ecnica de poda de los par�ametros de los modelos de traducci�on actuales, cuya intuici�on est�a basada en el concepto de segmentaci�on biling¤ue, pero que termina por evolucionar hacia una estrategia de re-estimaci�on de dichos par�ametros. Utilizando esta estrategia se obtienen resultados experimentales que demuestran que es posible podar la tabla de segmentos hasta en un 97%, sin mermar por ello la calidad de las traducciones obtenidas. Adem�as, estos resultados son coherentes en diferentes pares de lenguas, lo cual evidencia que la t�ecnica que se presenta aqu�ÿ es efectiva en un entorno de traducci�on autom�atica tradicional, y por lo tanto podr�ÿa ser utilizada directamente en un escenario de post-edici�on. Sin embargo, los experimentos llevados a cabo en traducci�on interactiva son ligeramente menos convincentes, pues implican la necesidad de llegar a un compromiso entre el tiempo de respuesta y la calidad de los sufijos producidos. Por otra parte, se presentan dos t�ecnicas de adaptaci�on, con el prop�osito de mejorar la adaptabilidad de los sistemas de traducci�on autom�atica. La primeraSanchis Trilles, G. (2012). Building task-oriented machine translation systems [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/17174Palanci

A Deep Source-Context Feature for Lexical Selection in Statistical Machine Translation

this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Pattern Recognition Letters . Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Pattern Recognition Letters 75 (2016) 24–29. DOI 10.1016/j.patrec.2016.02.014.This paper presents a methodology to address lexical disambiguation in a standard phrase-based statistical machine translation system. Similarity among source contexts is used to select appropriate translation units. The information is introduced as a novel feature of the phrase-based model and it is used to select the translation units extracted from the training sentence more similar to the sentence to translate. The similarity is computed through a deep autoencoder representation, which allows to obtain effective lowdimensional embedding of data and statistically significant BLEU score improvements on two different tasks (English-to-Spanish and English-to-Hindi). © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.The work of the first author has been supported by FPI UPV pre-doctoral grant (num. registro - 3505). The work of the second author has been supported by Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, contract TEC2015-69266-P and the Seventh Framework Program of the European Commission through the International Outgoing Fellowship Marie Curie Action (IMTraP-2011-29951). The work of the third author has been supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, SomEMBED TIN2015-71147-C2-1-P research project and by the Generalitat Valenciana under the grant ALMAPATER (PrometeoII/2014/030).Gupta, PA.; Costa-Jussa, MR.; Rosso, P.; Banchs, R. (2016). A Deep Source-Context Feature for Lexical Selection in Statistical Machine Translation. Pattern Recognition Letters. 75:24-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2016.02.014S24297

The ADAPT system description for the IWSLT 2018 Basque to English translation task

In this paper we present the ADAPT system built for the Basque to English Low Resource MT Evaluation Campaign. Basque is a low-resourced, morphologically-rich language. This poses a challenge for Neural Machine Translation models which usually achieve better performance when trained with large sets of data. Accordingly, we used synthetic data to improve the translation quality produced by a model built using only authentic data. Our proposal uses back-translated data to: (a) create new sentences, so the system can be trained with more data; and (b) translate sentences that are close to the test set, so the model can be fine-tuned to the document to be translated

The UPV Handwriting Recognition and Translation System for OpenHaRT 2013

The NIST Open Handwriting Recognition and Translation Evaluation 2013 (NIST OpenHaRT’13) is a performance evaluation assessing technologies that transcribe and translate text in document images. This evaluation is focused on recognizing Arabic text images and translating them into English. A Handwriting Recognition and Translation system typically consists of a combination of two systems: a Text Recognition system and a Machine Translation system. In this paper, we present the UPV participation in the NIST OpenHaRT 2013 evaluation. For the Text Recognition system we used the TL toolkit for training and recognition. For the Machine Translation system we used the Moses toolkit for training and decoding. Results in this evaluation are challenging and they significantly outperform our previous results in the OpenHaRT 2010 evaluation.Alkhoury, I.; Giménez Pastor, A.; Andrés Ferrer, J.; Juan Císcar, A.; Sánchez Peiró, JA. (2013). The UPV Handwriting Recognition and Translation System for OpenHaRT 2013. US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). http://hdl.handle.net/10251/5439

Explicit length modelling for statistical machine translation

[EN] Explicit length modelling has been previously explored in statistical pattern recognition with successful results. In this paper, two length models along with two parameter estimation methods and two alternative parametrisations for statistical machine translation (SMT) are presented. More precisely, we incorporate explicit bilingual length modelling in a state-of-the-art log-linear SMT system as an additional feature function in order to prove the contribution of length information. Finally, a systematic evaluation on reference SMT tasks considering different language pairs proves the benefits of explicit length modelling.Work supported by the EC (FEDER/FSE) under the transLectures project (FP7-ICT-2011-7-287755) and the Spanish MEC/MICINN under the MIPRCV "Consolider Ingenio 2010" program (CSD2007-00018) and iTrans2 (TIN2009-14511) projects and FPU grant (AP2010-4349). Also supported by the Spanish MITyC under the erudito.com (TSI-020110-2009-439) project and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grants Prometeo/2009/014 and GV/2010/067, and by the UPV under the AdInTAO (20091027) project. The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their criticisms and suggestions.Silvestre Cerdà, JA.; Andrés Ferrer, J.; Civera Saiz, J. (2012). Explicit length modelling for statistical machine translation. Pattern Recognition. 45(9):3183-3192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2012.01.006S3183319245

Findings of the IWSLT 2022 Evaluation Campaign.

The evaluation campaign of the 19th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation featured eight shared tasks: (i) Simultaneous speech translation, (ii) Offline speech translation, (iii) Speech to speech translation, (iv) Low-resource speech translation, (v) Multilingual speech translation, (vi) Dialect speech translation, (vii) Formality control for speech translation, (viii) Isometric speech translation. A total of 27 teams participated in at least one of the shared tasks. This paper details, for each shared task, the purpose of the task, the data that were released, the evaluation metrics that were applied, the submissions that were received and the results that were achieved