Transcription of conference room meetings: an investigation

Thomas Hain, John Dines, Giulia Garau, Martin Karafiát, Darren Moore, Vincent Wan, Roeland Ordelman, Steve Renals

Abstract: The automatic processing of speech collected in conference style meetings has attracted considerable interest with several large scale projects devoted to this area. In this paper we explore the use of various meeting corpora for the purpose of automatic speech recognition. In particular we investigate the similarity of these resources and how to efficiently use them in the construction of a meeting transcription system. The analysis shows distinctive features for each resource. However the benefit in pooling data and hence the similarity seems sufficient to speak of a generic "conference meeting domain". In this context this paper also presents work on development for the AMI meeting transcription system, a joint effort by seven sites working on the AMI (augmented multi-party interaction) project.