Hybrid Multi-Step Disfluency Detection

Sebastian Germesin
DFKI
Germany

(A joint HAIL/SALS-SIG Seminar)

*** Note unusual seminar day ***

Wednesday 1st October 2008 at 11am

 

Abstract

Previous research has shown that speech disfluencies - speech errors that occur in spoken language - affect NLP systems and hence need to be repaired or at least marked. The talk presents our experiences with a hybrid approach that uses different detection techniques for this task where each of these techniques is specialized within its own disfluency domain. A thorough investigation of the used disfluency scheme, led us to a detection design where basic rule-matching techniques are combined with machine learning approaches. The aim was both to reduce computational overhead and processing time and also to increase the detection performance. In fact, our system works with an accuracy of 92.9% and an F-Score of 90.6% while working faster than real-time.

Short resume

Sebastian Germesin was born in Merzig, Germany and started his studies of computer science at the Saarland University in 2002. He finished his studies in May 2008 with a Master's degree and after that, he started working as a PhD at the DFKI - the German Research Center for Atrificial Inelligence - at Saarbrcken in the AMIDA project which is a multi-disciplinary research project whose aims are to develop technology to support human interaction in meetings and to provide better structure to the way meetings are run and documented. His main research topics are the classification of dialogue acts and furthermore the detection and classification of speech errors (so called disfluencies) which occur in spoken language.

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