Meetings about meetings: research at ICSI on speech in multiparty conversations

Abstract

In early 2001, we reported (at the Human Language Technology meeting) the early stages of an ICSI (International Computer Science Institute) project on processing speech from meetings (in collaboration with other sites, principally SRI, Columbia, and UW). We report our progress from the first few years of this effort, including: the collection and subsequent release of a 75-meeting corpus (over 70 meeting-hours and up to 16 channels for each meeting); the development of a prosodic database for a large subset of these meetings, and its subsequent use for punctuation and disfluency detection; the development of a dialog annotation scheme and its implementation for a large subset of the meetings; and the improvement of both near-mic and far-mic speech recognition results for meeting speech test sets.