Automatic Classification and Transcription of Telephone Speech in Radio Broadcast Data

Automatic transcription of telephone speech involves additional challenges compared to wideband data processing, mainly due to channel limitations and to particular characteristics of conversational telephone speech. While in TV speech recognition applications, such as automatic transcription of broadcast news, the presence of telephone data is nearly insignificant (less than 1 %), in most radio broadcast stations the presence of telephone speech grows significantly. Thus, transcription of telephone speech data deserves special attention in radio broadcast applications. In this work, we describe our initial efforts to tackle this particular problem. First, a telephone channel classifier is proposed to automatically detect telephone segments. Then, some strategies for increasing robustness of the automatic transcription system are in-