Structural Metadata Research in the Ears Program

Abstract

Both human and automatic processing of speech require recognition of more than just words. In this paper we provide a brief overview of research on structural metadata extraction in the DARPA EARS rich transcription program. Tasks include detection of sentence boundaries, filler words, and disfluencies. Modeling approaches combine lexical, prosodic, and syntactic information, using various modeling techniques for knowledge source integration. The performance of these methods is evaluated by task, by data source (broadcast news versus spontaneous telephone conversations) and by whether transcriptions come from humans or from an (errorful) automatic speech recognizer. A representative sample of results shows that combining multiple knowledge sources (words, prosody, syntactic information) is helpful, that prosody is more helpful for news speech than for conversational speech, that word errors significantly impact performance, and that discriminative models generally provide benefit over maximum likelihood models. Important remaining issues, both technical and programmatic, are also discussed.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2005
Accession Number
ADA444239

Entities

People

  • Andreas Stolcke
  • Barbara Peskin
  • Dustin Hillard
  • Elizabeth Shriberg
  • Jeremy Ang
  • Marcus Tomalin
  • Mari Ostendorf
  • Mary Harper
  • Phil Woodland
  • Yang Liu

Organizations

  • International Computer Science Institute

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Automated Speech Recognition
  • Boundaries
  • Computer Science
  • Decoding
  • Detection
  • Errors
  • Event Detection
  • Extraction
  • False Alarms
  • Language
  • Machine Learning
  • Metadata
  • Probability
  • Recognition
  • Standards
  • Test Sets

Readers

  • Speech Processing/Speech Recognition.
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Bayesian Inference
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation