Oral history is about oral sources of witnesses and commentors on historical events. Speech technology is an important instrument to process such recordings in order to obtain transcription and further enhancements to structure the oral account In this contribution we address the transcription portal and the webservices associated with speech processing at BAS, speech solutions developed at LINDAT, how to do it yourself with Whisper, remaining challenges, and future developments.

We summarize the involvement of our CEMI team in the ”NLI Shared Task 2017”, which deals with both textual and speech input data. We submitted the results achieved by using three different system architectures; each of them combines multiple supervised learning models trained on various feature sets. As expected, better results are achieved with the systems that use both the textual data and the spoken responses. Combining the input data of two different modalities led to a rather dramatic improvement in classification performance. Our best performing method is based on a set of feed-forward neural networks whose hidden-layer outputs are combined together using a softmax layer. We achieved a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.9257 on the evaluation (unseen) test set and our team placed first in the main task together with other three teams.

This paper describes part of the corpus collection efforts underway in the EC funded Companions project. The Companions project is collecting substantial quantities of dialogue a large part of which focus on reminiscing about photographs. The texts are in English and Czech. We describe the context and objectives for which this dialogue corpus is being collected, the methodology being used and make observations on the resulting data. The corpora will be made available to the wider research community through the Companions Project web site.

In our paper, we present a method for incorporating available linguistic information into a statistical language model that is used in ASR system for transcribing spontaneous speech. We employ the class-based language model paradigm and use the morphological tags as the basis for world-to-class mapping. Since the number of different tags is at least by one order of magnitude lower than the number of words even in the tasks with moderately-sized vocabularies, the tag-based model can be rather robustly estimated using even the relatively small text corpora. Unfortunately, this robustness goes hand in hand with restricted predictive ability of the class-based model. Hence we apply the two-pass recognition strategy, where the first pass is performed with the standard word-based n-gram and the resulting lattices are rescored in the second pass using the aforementioned class-based model. Using this decoding scenario, we have managed to moderately improve the word error rate in the performed ASR experiments.