The Rich Transcription 2005 Spring Meeting

This paper presents the design and results of the Rich Transcription Spring 2005 (RT-05S) Meeting Recognition Evaluation. This evaluation is the third in a series of community-wide evaluations of language technologies in the meeting domain. For 2005, four evaluation tasks were supported. These included a speech-to-text (STT) transcription task and three diarization tasks: "Who Spoke When", "Speech Activity Detection", and "Source Localization." The latter two were first-time experimental proof-of-concept tasks and were treated as "dry runs". For the STT task, the lowest word error rate for the multiple distant microphone condition was 30.0% which represented an impressive 33% relative reduction from the best result obtained in the last such evaluation - - the Rich Transcription Spring 2004 Meeting Recognition Evaluation. For the diarization "Who Spoke When" task, the lowest diarization error rate was 18.56% which represented a 19% relative reduction from that of RT-04S

Search-Based Endogenous Illiquidity and the Macroeconomy

We endogenize asset liquidity in a dynamic general equilibrium model with search frictions on asset markets. In the model, asset liquidity is tantamount to the ease of issuance and resaleability of private financial claims, which is driven by investors' participation on the search market. Limited resaleability of private claims creates a role for liquid assets, such as government bonds or fiat money, to ease funding constraints. We show that liquidity and asset prices positively co-move. When the capacity of the asset market to channel funds to entrepreneurs deteriorates, the hedging value of liquid assets increases. Our model is thus able to match the flight to liquidity observed during recessions. Finally, we show that investors' search market participation is more intense in a constrained efficient economy