Transcribing with Annotation Graphs.

Abstract

Transcriber is a tool for manual annotation of large speech files. It was originally designed for the broadcast news transcription task. The annotation file format was derived from previous formats used for this task, and many related features were hard-coded. In this paper we present a generalization of the tool based on the annotation graph formalism, and on a more modular design. This will allow us to address new tasks, while retaining the simple, crisp user-interface which is critical for user acceptance. 1. Introduction The development and refinement of speech recognition systems requires a large amount of transcribed speech data. Production of these corpora is a highly time-consuming task and requires specialized software tools. In order to support a project involving the automatic transcription and indexing of multilingual broadcast news, DGA developed "Transcriber", a tool for manually segmenting, labeling and transcribing speech signals having extended duration (up to severa...