3,742 research outputs found
A spoken document retrieval application in the oral history domain
The application of automatic speech recognition in the broadcast news domain is well studied. Recognition performance is generally high and accordingly, spoken document retrieval can successfully be applied in this domain, as demonstrated by a number of commercial systems. In other domains, a similar recognition performance is hard to obtain, or even far out of reach, for example due to lack of suitable training material. This is a serious impediment for the successful application of spoken document retrieval techniques for other data then news. This paper outlines our first steps towards a retrieval system that can automatically be adapted to new domains. We discuss our experience with a recently implemented spoken document retrieval application attached to a web-portal that aims at the disclosure of a multimedia data collection in the oral history domain. The paper illustrates that simply deploying an off-theshelf\ud
broadcast news system in this task domain will produce error rates that are too high to be useful for retrieval tasks. By applying adaptation techniques on the acoustic level and language model level, system performance can be improved considerably, but additional research on unsupervised adaptation and search interfaces is required to create an adequate search environment based on speech transcripts
Robust audio indexing for Dutch spoken-word collections
Abstract—Whereas the growth of storage capacity is in accordance with widely acknowledged predictions, the possibilities to index and access the archives created is lagging behind. This is especially the case in the oral history domain and much of the rich content in these collections runs the risk to remain inaccessible for lack of robust search technologies. This paper addresses the history and development of robust audio indexing technology for searching Dutch spoken-word collections and compares Dutch audio indexing in the well-studied broadcast news domain with an oral-history case-study. It is concluded that despite significant advances in Dutch audio indexing technology and demonstrated applicability in several domains, further research is indispensable for successful automatic disclosure of spoken-word collections
Automated speech and audio analysis for semantic access to multimedia
The deployment and integration of audio processing tools can enhance the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and as a consequence, improve the effectiveness of conceptual access tools. This paper overviews the various ways in which automatic speech and audio analysis can contribute to increased granularity of automatically extracted metadata. A number of techniques will be presented, including the alignment of speech and text resources, large vocabulary speech recognition, key word spotting and speaker classification. The applicability of techniques will be discussed from a media crossing perspective. The added value of the techniques and their potential contribution to the content value chain will be illustrated by the description of two (complementary) demonstrators for browsing broadcast news archives
Improving Searchability of Automatically Transcribed Lectures Through Dynamic Language Modelling
Recording university lectures through lecture capture systems is increasingly common.
However, a single continuous audio recording is often unhelpful for users, who may wish
to navigate quickly to a particular part of a lecture, or locate a specific lecture within a set
of recordings.
A transcript of the recording can enable faster navigation and searching. Automatic speech
recognition (ASR) technologies may be used to create automated transcripts, to avoid the
significant time and cost involved in manual transcription.
Low accuracy of ASR-generated transcripts may however limit their usefulness. In
particular, ASR systems optimized for general speech recognition may not recognize the
many technical or discipline-specific words occurring in university lectures. To improve
the usefulness of ASR transcripts for the purposes of information retrieval (search) and
navigating within recordings, the lexicon and language model used by the ASR engine may
be dynamically adapted for the topic of each lecture.
A prototype is presented which uses the English Wikipedia as a semantically dense, large
language corpus to generate a custom lexicon and language model for each lecture from a
small set of keywords. Two strategies for extracting a topic-specific subset of Wikipedia
articles are investigated: a naïve crawler which follows all article links from a set of seed
articles produced by a Wikipedia search from the initial keywords, and a refinement which
follows only links to articles sufficiently similar to the parent article. Pair-wise article
similarity is computed from a pre-computed vector space model of Wikipedia article term
scores generated using latent semantic indexing.
The CMU Sphinx4 ASR engine is used to generate transcripts from thirteen recorded
lectures from Open Yale Courses, using the English HUB4 language model as a reference
and the two topic-specific language models generated for each lecture from Wikipedia
Reinforcement Learning of Speech Recognition System Based on Policy Gradient and Hypothesis Selection
Speech recognition systems have achieved high recognition performance for
several tasks. However, the performance of such systems is dependent on the
tremendously costly development work of preparing vast amounts of task-matched
transcribed speech data for supervised training. The key problem here is the
cost of transcribing speech data. The cost is repeatedly required to support
new languages and new tasks. Assuming broad network services for transcribing
speech data for many users, a system would become more self-sufficient and more
useful if it possessed the ability to learn from very light feedback from the
users without annoying them. In this paper, we propose a general reinforcement
learning framework for speech recognition systems based on the policy gradient
method. As a particular instance of the framework, we also propose a hypothesis
selection-based reinforcement learning method. The proposed framework provides
a new view for several existing training and adaptation methods. The
experimental results show that the proposed method improves the recognition
performance compared to unsupervised adaptation.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure
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
Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda
Recorded interviews form a rich basis for scholarly inquiry. Examples include oral histories, community memory projects, and interviews conducted for broadcast media. Emerging technologies offer the potential to radically transform the way in which recorded interviews are made accessible, but this vision will demand substantial investments from a broad range of research communities. This article reviews the present state of practice for making recorded interviews available and the state-of-the-art for key component technologies. A large number of important research issues are identified, and from that set of issues, a coherent research agenda is proposed
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