Cyberpunc: a lightweight punctuation annotation system for speech

Doug Beeferman Adam Berger John La erty School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh PA 15213 dougb,aberger,la [email protected] ABSTRACT This paper describes a lightweight method for the automatic insertion of intra-sentence punctuation into text. Despite the intuition that pauses in an acoustic stream are a positive indicator for some types of punctuation, this work will demonstrate the feasibility of a system which relies solely on lexical information. Besides its potential role in a speech recognition system, such a system could serve equally well in non-speech applications such as automatic grammar correction in a word processor and parsing of spoken text. After describing the design of a punctuationrestoration system, which relies on a trigram language model and a straightforward application of the Viterbi algorithm, we summarize results, both quantitative and subjective, of the performance and behavior of a prototype system.