Arjan van Hessen


2024

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Speech Technology Services for Oral History Research
Christoph Draxler | Henk van den Heuvel | Arjan van Hessen | Pavel Ircing | Jan Lehečka
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources (HTRes) @ LREC-COLING 2024

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.

2022

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Towards an Open-Source Dutch Speech Recognition System for the Healthcare Domain
Cristian Tejedor-García | Berrie van der Molen | Henk van den Heuvel | Arjan van Hessen | Toine Pieters
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

The current largest open-source generic automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for Dutch, Kaldi_NL, does not include a domain-specific healthcare jargon in the lexicon. Commercial alternatives (e.g., Google ASR system) are also not suitable for this purpose, not only because of the lexicon issue, but they do not safeguard privacy of sensitive data sufficiently and reliably. These reasons motivate that just a small amount of medical staff employs speech technology in the Netherlands. This paper proposes an innovative ASR training method developed within the Homo Medicinalis (HoMed) project. On the semantic level it specifically targets automatic transcription of doctor-patient consultation recordings with a focus on the use of medicines. In the first stage of HoMed, the Kaldi_NL language model (LM) is fine-tuned with lists of Dutch medical terms and transcriptions of Dutch online healthcare news bulletins. Despite the acoustic challenges and linguistic complexity of the domain, we reduced the word error rate (WER) by 5.2%. The proposed method could be employed for ASR domain adaptation to other domains with sensitive and special category data. These promising results allow us to apply this methodology on highly sensitive audiovisual recordings of patient consultations at the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research (Nivel).

2020

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A CLARIN Transcription Portal for Interview Data
Christoph Draxler | Henk van den Heuvel | Arjan van Hessen | Silvia Calamai | Louise Corti
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

In this paper we present a first version of a transcription portal for audio files based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) in various languages. The portal is implemented in the CLARIN resources research network and intended for use by non-technical scholars. We explain the background and interdisciplinary nature of interview data, the perks and quirks of using ASR for transcribing the audio in a research context, the dos and don’ts for optimal use of the portal, and future developments foreseen. The portal is promoted in a range of workshops, but there are a number of challenges that have to be met. These challenges concern privacy issues, ASR quality, and cost, amongst others.

2014

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Croatian Memories
Arjan van Hessen | Franciska de Jong | Stef Scagliola | Tanja Petrovic
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

In this contribution we describe a collection of approximately 400 video interviews recorded in the context of the project Croatian Memories (CroMe) with the objective of documenting personal war-related experiences. The value of this type of sources is threefold: they contain information that is missing in written sources, they can contribute to the process of reconciliation, and they provide a basis for reuse of data in disciplines with an interest in narrative data. The CroMe collection is not primarily designed as a linguistic corpus, but is the result of an archival effort to collect so-called oral history data. For researchers in the fields of natural language processing and speech analy¬sis this type of life-stories may function as an object trouvé containing real-life language data that can prove to be useful for the purpose of modelling specific aspects of human expression and communication.

2011

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Sharing Resources in CLARIN-NL
Jan Odijk | Arjan van Hessen
Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Resources, Technology and Services in the Sharing Paradigm