The meeting project at ICSI

ABSTRACT

In collaboration with colleagues at UW, OGI, IBM, and SRI, we are developing technology to process spoken language from informal meetings. The work includes a substantial data collection and transcription effort, and has required a nontrivial degree of infrastructure development. We are undertaking this because the new task area provides a significant challenge to current HLT capabilities, while offering the promise of a wide range of potential applications. In this paper, we give our vision of the task, the challenges it represents, and the current state of our development, with particular attention to automatic transcription.

REFERENCES

• 1: Manfred Beham , Günther Ruske, Adaptiver stochastischer Sprache/Pause-Detektor, Mustererkennung 1995, 17. DAGM-Symposium, p.60-67, September 13-15, 1995
• 2: D. Biber, Variation across speech and writing. 1st pbk. ed. Cambridge {England}; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• 3: W. Chafe, Cognitive constraints on information flow. In R. S. Tomlin (ed.) Coherence and grounding in discourse. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 21--51, 1987.
• 4: J. Edwards, The transcription of Discourse. In D. Tannen, D. Schiffrin, and H. Hamilton (eds). The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. NY: Blackwell (in press).
• 5: H. Hermansky, D. Ellis, and S. Sharma, Tandem connectionist feature stream extraction for conventional HMM systems, Proc. ICASSP, pp. III-1635--1638, Istanbul, 2000.
• 6: H. Hermansky and N. Morgan, RASTA Processing of Speech, IEEE Trans. Speech and Audio Processing 2(4), 578--589, 1994.
• 7: A. Janin and N. Morgan, SpeechCorder, the Portable Meeting Recorder, Workshop on hands-free speech communication, Kyoto, April 9--11, 2001.
• 8: http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/speech/mtgrcdr.html
• 9: E. Shriberg, R. Bates, A. Stolcke, P. Taylor, D. Jurafsky, K. Ries, N. Coccaro, R. Martin, M. Meteer, and C. Van Ess-Dykema. Can prosody aid the automatic classification of dialog acts in conversational speech? Language and Speech, 41(3--4):439--487, 1998.
• 10: Elizabeth Shriberg , Andreas Stolcke , Dilek Hakkani-Tür , Gükhan Tür, Prosody-based automatic segmentation of speech into sentences and topics, Speech Communication, v.32 n.1-2, p.127-154, Sept. 2000 [doi>10.1016/S0167-6393(00)00028-5]
• 11: A. Stolcke, H. Bratt, J. Butzberger, H. Franco, V. R. Rao Gadde, M. Plauché, C. Richey, E. Shriberg, K. Sönmez, F. Weng, and J. Zheng. The SRI March 2000 Hub-5 conversational speech transcription system. Proc. NIST Speech Transcription Workshop, College Park, MD, May 2000.
• 12: Andreas Stolcke , Noah Coccaro , Rebecca Bates , Paul Taylor , Carol Van Ess-Dykema , Klaus Ries , Elizabeth Shriberg , Daniel Jurafsky , Rachel Martin , Marie Meteer, Dialogue act modeling for automatic tagging and recognition of conversational speech, Computational Linguistics, v.26 n.3, p.339-373, September 2000 [doi>10.1162/089120100561737]
• 13: http://www.etca.fr/CTA/gip/Projects/Transcriber/
• 14: A. Waibel, M. Bett, M. Finke, and R. Stiefelhagen, Meeting Browser: Tracking and Summarizing Meetings, Proc. DARPA Broadcast News Transcription and Understanding Workshop, Lansdowne, VA, 1998.
• 15: H. Yu, C. Clark, R. Malkin, and A. Waibel, Experiments in Automatic Meeting Transcription Using JRTK, Proc. ICASSP, pp. 921--924, Seattle, 1998.