2009 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Restoring Punctuation and Capitalization in Transcribed Speech

Gravano, Agustin; Jansche, Martin; Bacchiani, Michiel

Adding punctuation and capitalization greatly improves the readability of automatic speech transcripts. We discuss an approach for performing both tasks in a single pass using a purely text-basedn-gram language model. We study the effect on performance of varying the n-gram order (from n = 3 to n = 6) and the amount of training data (from 58 million to
55 billion tokens). Our results show that using larger training data sets consistently improves performance, while increasing the n-gram order does not help nearly as much.