2022
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An Empirical Study of Topic Transition in Dialogue
Mayank Soni
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Brendan Spillane
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Leo Muckley
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Orla Cooney
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Emer Gilmartin
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Christian Saam
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Benjamin Cowan
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Vincent Wade
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse
Although topic transition has been studied in dialogue for decades, only a handful of corpora based quantitative studies have been conducted to investigate the nature of topic transitions. Towards this end, this study annotates 215 conversations from the switchboard corpus, perform quantitative analysis and finds that 1) longer conversations consists of more topic transitions, 2) topic transition are usually lead by one participant and 3) we found no pattern in time series progression of topic transition. We also model topic transition with a precision of 91%.
2018
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Just Talking - Modelling Casual Conversation
Emer Gilmartin
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Christian Saam
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Carl Vogel
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Nick Campbell
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Vincent Wade
Proceedings of the 19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
Casual conversation has become a focus for artificial dialogue applications. Such talk is ubiquitous and its structure differs from that found in the task-based interactions which have been the focus of dialogue system design for many years. It is unlikely that such conversations can be modelled as an extension of task-based talk. We review theories of casual conversation, report on our studies of the structure of casual dialogue, and outline challenges we see for the development of spoken dialog systems capable of carrying on casual friendly conversation in addition to performing well-defined tasks.
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The ADELE Corpus of Dyadic Social Text Conversations:Dialog Act Annotation with ISO 24617-2
Emer Gilmartin
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Christian Saam
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Brendan Spillane
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Maria O’Reilly
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Ketong Su
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Arturo Calvo
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Loredana Cerrato
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Killian Levacher
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Nick Campbell
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Vincent Wade
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)
2017
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Annotation of greeting, introduction, and leavetaking in dialogues
Emer Gilmartin
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Brendan Spillane
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Maria O’Reilly
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Christian Saam
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Ketong Su
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Benjamin R. Cowan
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Killian Levacher
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Arturo Calvo Devesa
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Lodana Cerrato
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Nick Campbell
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Vincent Wade
Proceedings of the 13th Joint ISO-ACL Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-13)
2014
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Towards desktop-based CAT tool instrumentation
John Moran
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Christian Saam
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Dave Lewis
Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Though a number of web-based CAT tools have emerged over recent years, to date the most common form of CAT tool used by translators remains the desktop-based CAT tool. However, currently none of the most commonly used desktop-based CAT tools provide a means of measuring translation speed at a segment level. This metric is important, as previous work on MT productivity testing has shown that edit distance can be a misleading measure of MT post-editing effort. In this paper we present iOmegaT, an instrumented version of a popular desktop-based open-source CAT tool called OmegaT. We survey a number of similar applications and outline some of the weaknesses of web-based CAT tools for experi- enced professional translators. On the basis of a two productivity test carried out using iOmegaT we show why it is important to be able to identify fast good post-editors to maximize MT utility and how this is problematic using only edit-distance measures. Finally, we argue how and why instrumentation could be added to more commonly used desktop-based CAT tools that are paid for by freelance translators if their privacy is respected.
2012
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The 2012 KIT and KIT-NAIST English ASR systems for the IWSLT evaluation
Christian Saam
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Christian Mohr
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Kevin Kilgour
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Michael Heck
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Matthias Sperber
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Keigo Kubo
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Sebatian Stüker
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Sakriani Sakri
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Graham Neubig
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Tomoki Toda
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Satoshi Nakamura
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Alex Waibel
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign
This paper describes our English Speech-to-Text (STT) systems for the 2012 IWSLT TED ASR track evaluation. The systems consist of 10 subsystems that are combinations of different front-ends, e.g. MVDR based and MFCC based ones, and two different phone sets. The outputs of the subsystems are combined via confusion network combination. Decoding is done in two stages, where the systems of the second stage are adapted in an unsupervised manner on the combination of the first stage outputs using VTLN, MLLR, and cM-LLR.
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The KIT-NAIST (contrastive) English ASR system for IWSLT 2012
Michael Heck
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Keigo Kubo
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Matthias Sperber
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Sakriani Sakti
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Sebastian Stüker
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Christian Saam
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Kevin Kilgour
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Christian Mohr
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Graham Neubig
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Tomoki Toda
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Satoshi Nakamura
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Alex Waibel
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign
This paper describes the KIT-NAIST (Contrastive) English speech recognition system for the IWSLT 2012 Evaluation Campaign. In particular, we participated in the ASR track of the IWSLT TED task. The system was developed by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) teams in collaboration within the interACT project. We employ single system decoding with fully continuous and semi-continuous models, as well as a three-stage, multipass system combination framework built with the Janus Recognition Toolkit. On the IWSLT 2010 test set our single system introduced in this work achieves a WER of 17.6%, and our final combination achieves a WER of 14.4%.
2011
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The 2011 KIT English ASR system for the IWSLT evaluation
Sebastian Stüker
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Kevin Kilgour
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Christian Saam
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Alex Waibel
Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign
This paper describes our English Speech-to-Text (STT) system for the 2011 IWSLT ASR track. The system consists of 2 subsystems with different front-ends—one MVDR based, one MFCC based—which are combined using confusion network combination to provide a base for a second pass speaker adapted MVDR system. We demonstrate that this set-up produces competitive results on the IWSLT 2010 dev and test sets.
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The 2011 KIT QUAERO speech-to-text system for Spanish
Kevin Kilgour
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Christian Saam
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Christian Mohr
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Sebastian Stüker
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Alex Waibel
Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers
This paper describes our current Spanish speech-to-text (STT) system with which we participated in the 2011 Quaero STT evaluation that is being developed within the Quaero program. The system consists of 4 separate subsystems, as well as the standard MFCC and MVDR phoneme based subsystems we included a both a phoneme and grapheme based bottleneck subsystem. We carefully evaluate the performance of each subsystem. After including several new techniques we were able to reduce the WER by over 30% from 20.79% to 14.53%.