Transcribing Speech for Spoken Document

Mari Ostendorf
University of Washington

Monday, November 3, 2008 at 1:00PM

54-134 Engineering IV Building
Refreshments Served

Abstract: As storage costs drop and bandwidth increases, there has been a rapid growth of information available via the web or in online archives, raising problems of finding and interpreting collections of documents. Significant recent progress has been made in text retrieval, analysis, summarization and translation, but much of this work has focused on written language. Increasingly, speech and video signals are also available -- including TV and radio broadcasts, congressional records, oral histories, voicemail, call center recordings, etc. -- which can be thought of as ``spoken documents''. Because it takes longer to listen to audio than to read text, spoken documents are clearly a prime candidate for automatic indexing, information extraction, and other such technologies, but new challenges arise when moving from written to spoken language. In this talk, we look at differences between speech and text, and how we can leverage the information in the speech signal beyond the words to provide punctuation and other structural information in an automatically generated transcript that better serves language processing applications. We also describe methods for representing the uncertainty associated with aspects of the transcript, which is useful for subsequent processing..

Biography: Mari Ostendorf received the Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1985. After working at BBN Laboratories (1985-1986) and Boston University (1987-1999), she joined the University of Washington (UW) in 1999. She has also served as a visiting researcher at the ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Laboratory in Japan in 1995 and at the University of Karlsruhe in 2005-2006. At UW, she is currently an Endowed Professor of System Design Methodologies in Electrical Engineering and an Adjunct Professor in Computer Science and Engineering and in Linguistics. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in signal processing and statistical learning, including a design-oriented freshman course that introduces students to signal processing and communications. Prof. Ostendorf's research interests are in dynamic and linguistically-motivated statistical models for speech and language processing. Her work has resulted in over 180 publications and 2 paper awards. Prof. Ostendorf has served on numerous technical and advisory committees, as co-Editor of Computer Speech and Language (1998-2003), and now as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing. She is a Fellow of IEEE and ISCA, and a member of ACL, SWE and Sigma Xi.