Request Correction

MOCCA: Measure of Confidence for Corpus Analysis - Automatic Reliability Check of Transcript and Automatic Segmentation

The production of speech corpora typically involves manual labor to verify and correct the output of automatic transcription/segmentation processes. This study investigates the possibility of speeding up this correction process using techniques borrowed from automatic speech recognition to predict the location of transcription or segmentation errors in the signal. This was achieved with functionals of features derived from a typical Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based speech segmentation system and a classification/regression approach based on Support Vector Machine (SVM)/Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Random Forest (RF). Classifiers were tuned in a 10-fold cross validation on an annotated corpus of spontaneous speech. Tests on an independent speech corpus from a different domain showed that transcription errors were predicted with an accuracy of 78% using an SVM, while segmentation errors were predicted in the form of an overlap-measure which showed a Pearson correlation of 0.64 to a ground truth using Support Vector Regression (SVR). The methods described here will be implemented as free-to-use Common Language and Resources and Technology Infrastucture (CLARIN) web services.