Bridging the gap between speech technology and natural language processing: an evaluation toolbox for term discovery systems

Bogdan Ludusan, Maarten Versteegh, Aren Jansen, Guillaume Gravier, Xuan-Nga Cao, Mark Johnson, Emmanuel Dupoux


Abstract
The unsupervised discovery of linguistic terms from either continuous phoneme transcriptions or from raw speech has seen an increasing interest in the past years both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint. Yet, there exists no common accepted evaluation method for the systems performing term discovery. Here, we propose such an evaluation toolbox, drawing ideas from both speech technology and natural language processing. We first transform the speech-based output into a symbolic representation and compute five types of evaluation metrics on this representation: the quality of acoustic matching, the quality of the clusters found, and the quality of the alignment with real words (type, token, and boundary scores). We tested our approach on two term discovery systems taking speech as input, and one using symbolic input. The latter was run using both the gold transcription and a transcription obtained from an automatic speech recognizer, in order to simulate the case when only imperfect symbolic information is available. The results obtained are analysed through the use of the proposed evaluation metrics and the implications of these metrics are discussed.
Anthology ID:
L14-1284
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Venue:
LREC
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Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
560–567
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/320_Paper.pdf
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bogdan Ludusan, Maarten Versteegh, Aren Jansen, Guillaume Gravier, Xuan-Nga Cao, Mark Johnson, and Emmanuel Dupoux. 2014. Bridging the gap between speech technology and natural language processing: an evaluation toolbox for term discovery systems. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 560–567, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Bridging the gap between speech technology and natural language processing: an evaluation toolbox for term discovery systems (Ludusan et al., LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/320_Paper.pdf