Automated speech-unit delimitation in spoken learner English

Russell Moore, Andrew Caines, Calbert Graham, Paula Buttery

Abstract
In order to apply computational linguistic analyses and pass information to downstream applications, transcriptions of speech obtained via automatic speech recognition (ASR) need to be divided into smaller meaningful units, in a task we refer to as ‘speech-unit (SU) delimitation’. We closely recreate the automatic delimitation system described by Lee and Glass (2012), ‘Sentence detection using multiple annotations’, Proceedings of INTERSPEECH, which combines a prosodic model, language model and speech-unit length model in log-linear fashion. Since state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) tools have been developed to deal with written text and its characteristic sentence-like units, SU delimitation helps bridge the gap between ASR and NLP, by normalising spoken data into a more canonical format. Previous work has focused on native speaker recordings; we test the system of Lee and Glass (2012) on non-native speaker (or ‘learner’) data, achieving performance above the state-of-the-art. We also consider alternative evaluation metrics which move away from the idea of a single ‘truth’ in SU delimitation, and frame this work in the context of downstream NLP applications.
Anthology ID:
C16-1075
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
782–793
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1075
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Russell Moore, Andrew Caines, Calbert Graham, and Paula Buttery. 2016. Automated speech-unit delimitation in spoken learner English. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 782–793, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Automated speech-unit delimitation in spoken learner English (Moore et al., COLING 2016)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/C16-1075.pdf
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