11:30-12:00
"An Iterative Technique for Segmenting Speech and Text Alignment"
Arthur Toth

Numerous speech-processing tasks use data in the form of a
large audio file with an associated text transcript.  In many cases,
it is necessary to split the audio file into smaller segments for
processing, and to make the corresponding divisions in the transcript.
Some approaches to this problem have relied on additional information
beyond the text which facilitates the segmentation.  However, such
information is often not readily available, and it would be useful to
have a technique that could perform such segmentation and alignment
without depending on it.  We will describe an automatic technique that
segments the audio file based solely on acoustic information, and then
attempts to determine where these segments occur in the text.  The
discussion will include the results of testing this technique on a
portion of the Boston University Radio Corpus.