Formatting Time-Aligned ASR Transcripts for Readability

Maria Shugrina

Abstract: We address the problem of formatting the output of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for readability, while preserving word-level timing information of the transcript. Our system enriches the ASR transcript with punctuation, capitalization and properly written dates, times and other numeric entities, and our approach can be applied to other formatting tasks. The method we describe combines hand-crafted grammars with a class-based language model trained on written text and relies on Weighted Finite State Transducers (WFSTs) for the preservation of start and end time of each word.