ASR2000 - Automatic Speech Recognition: Challenges for the new Millenium September 18-20, 2000 Paris, France

Sentence Boundary Detection in Broadcast Speech Transcripts

Yoshihiko Gotoh and Steve Renals

Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK

This paper presents an approach to identifying sentence boundaries in broadcast speech transcripts. We describe finite state models that extract sentence boundary information statistically from text and audio sources. An n-gram language model is constructed from a collection of British English news broadcasts and scripts. An alternative model is estimated from pause duration information in speech recogniser outputs aligned with their programme script counterparts. Experimental results show that the pause duration model alone outperforms the language modelling approach and that, by combining these two models, it can be improved further and precision and recall scores of over 70% were attained for the task.

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Bibliographic reference.  Gotoh, Yoshihiko / Renals, Steve (2000): "Sentence boundary detection in broadcast speech transcripts", In ASR-2000, 228-235.