New developments in automatic meeting transcription

In this paper we report on new developments in the automatic meeting transcription task. Unlike other types of speech (such as those found in Broadcast News and Switchboard), meetings are unique in their richer dynamics of human-to-human interaction. An intuitive “fingernail” plot is proposed to visualize such turntaking behavior. We will also show how recognition of short turns can be improved by building a language model tailored specifically for short turns. Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) words become a more salient problem in the meeting transcription task, as they are mostly topic words and proper names, lack of which not only causes Word Error Rate (WER) increase, but also limits further use of recognition hypotheses. We describe a prototype system which uses the Web as a source for vocabulary expansion, and present preliminary OOV retrieval results.