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Browsing and Searching Audio Data: SCANMail
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| ABSTRACT |
Currently, large amounts of speech data are available in personal
(voicemail), company proprietary (recorded conference calls, focus
group sessions, customer care recordings), and public databases
(newscasts, films). However, such speech corpora are difficult to
make use of, for lack of tools to browse and search them. We have
developed such tools in several audio browsing and search projects,
one of which, SCANMail, I will describe in this talk.
SCANMail combines automatic speech recognition with information
retrieval and information extraction technologies to provide voicemail
users with the ability to manipulate their voicemail messages much as
they do their email messages, searching them by content, extracting
key bits of information (phone numbers, callerids) from them, and
accessing parts of them randomly rather than in sequence. Results are
presented to the user in a client GUI whose capabilities have been
tested in laboratory experiments and a field trial. Access via Java
phone and in standard email clients is also possible. In the talk I
will describe and demonstrate the system and discuss several novel
features of the technology in more detail: the ranking of messages by
urgency or private/business nature, using a combination of acoustic
and lexical information, and the extract of key pieces of information
from the automatic transcriptions. A demo of the SCANMail system is
available at
http://www.fancentral.org/~isenhour/scanmail/demo.html.
| BIO |
Dr. Hirschberg is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University.
She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania,
after previously doing teaching and research in sixteenth-century Mexican social
history (PhD from the University of Michigan). She works part-time at AT&T
Laboratories -- Research, where she previously had worked since 1985. She is editor-
in-chief of Computational Linguistics, the journal of the Association for
Computational Linguistics. She has also been a fellow of the American Association for
Artificial Intelligence since 1994. She serves on the executive committee of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), on the Permanent Council for the
Organisation of International Conferences on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP)
and is the vice president of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).