Publications

We report on results of two experiments designed to compare subjects' ability to extract information from audio recordings of conversational telephone speech (CTS) with their ability to extract information from text transcripts of these conversations, with and without the ability to hear the audio recordings. Although progress in machine processing...

We present results from an experiment in which educated English-native speakers answered questions from a machine translated version of a standardized Arabic language test. We compare the machine translation (MT) results with professional reference translations as a baseline for the purpose of determining the level of Arabic reading comprehension that...

In this paper we discuss an extension to the widely used score normalization technique of test normalization (Tnorm) for text-independent speaker verification. A new method of speaker Adaptive-Tnorm that offers advantages over the standard Tnorm by adjusting the speaker set to the target model is presented. Examples of this improvement...

We present highlights from three experiments that test the readability of current state-of-the art system output from (1) an automated English speech-to-text system (2) a text-based Arabic-to-English machine translation system and (3) an audio-based Arabic-to-English MT process. We measure readability in terms of reaction time and passage comprehension in each...

The MIT Lincoln Laboratory submission for the 2004 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE) was built upon seven core systems using speaker information from short-term acoustics, pitch and duration prosodic behavior, and phoneme and word usage. These different levels of information were modeled and classified using Gaussian Mixture Models, Support Vector...

Cross-channel degradation is one of the significant challenges facing speaker recognition systems. We study the problem for speaker recognition using support vector machines (SVMs). We perform channel compensation in SVM modeling by removing non-speaker nuisance dimensions in the SVM expansion space via projections. Training to remove these dimensions is accomplished...

A dysphonia, or disorder of the mechanisms of phonation in the larynx, can create time-varying amplitude fluctuations in the voice. A model for band-dependent analysis of this amplitude modulation (AM) phenomenon in dysphonic speech is developed from a traditional communications engineering perspective. This perspective challenges current dysphonia analysis methods that...

Estimating and evaluating confidence has become a key aspect of the speaker recognition problem because of the increased use of this technology in forensic applications. We discuss evaluation measures for speaker recognition and some of their properties. We then propose a framework for confidence estimation based upon scores and metainformation...

The field of human language technology (HLT) encompasses algorithms and applications dedicated to processing human speech and written communication. We focus on two types of HLT systems: (1) machine translation systems, which convert text and speech files from one human language to another, and (2) speech-to-text (STT) systems, which produce...

Audio diarization is the process of annotating an input audio channel with information that attributes (possibly overlapping) temporal regions of signal energy to their specific sources. These sources can include particular speakers, music, background noise sources, and other signal source/channel characteristics. Diarization has utility in making automatic transcripts more readable...