Computer-assisted closed-captioning of live TV broadcasts in French

Abstract

Growing needs for French closed-captioning of live TV broadcasts in Canada cannot be met only with stenography-based technology because of a chronic shortage of skilled stenographers. Using speech recognition for live closed-captioning, however, requires several specific problems to be solved, such as the need for low-latency real-time recognition, remote operation, automated model updates, and collaborative work. In this paper we describe our solutions to these problems and the implementation of a live captioning system based on the CRIM speech recognizer. We report results from field deployment in several projects. The oldest in operation has been broadcasting real-time closed-captions for more than 2 years. Index Terms: speech recognition, closed-captioning, model adaptation.