Transcribing lectures and seminars

This paper describes recent research carried out in the context of the FP6 Integrated Project CHIL in developing a system to automatically transcribe lectures and seminars. We made use of widely available corpora to train both the acoustic and language models, since only a small amount of CHIL data were available for system development. For acoustic model training made use of the transcribed portion of the TED corpus of Eurospeech recordings, as well as the ICSI, ISL, and NIST meeting corpora. For language model training, text materials were extracted from a variety of on-line conference proceedings. Word error rates of about 25% are obtained on test data extracted 12 seminars.