Time is of the essence: an evaluation of temporal compression algorithms

ABSTRACT

Although speech is a potentially rich information source, a major barrier to exploiting speech archives is the lack of useful tools for efficiently accessing lengthy speech recordings. This paper develops and evaluates techniques for temporal compression - reducing the time people take to listen to a recording while still extracting critical information. We first describe an exploratory study that identifies novel excision techniques that remove unimportant words or utterances from the recording. We then develop a new method for evaluating how well temporal compression supports users in forming a general understanding of a recording. Applying this method, we demonstrate that excision techniques are generally more effective than standard compression techniques that simply speed up the entire recording.

REFERENCES

• 1: AMI Project. http://www.amiproject.org/
• 2: Barry Arons, SpeechSkimmer: a system for interactively skimming recorded speech, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.4 n.1, p.3-38, March 1997 [doi>10.1145/244754.244758]
• 3: Ricardo A. Baeza-Yates , Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Modern Information Retrieval, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999
• 4: Beasley, D.S. and Maki, J.E. Time and frequency altered speech. In Contemporary Issues in Experimental Phonetics, Academic Press, (1976), 419--458.
• 5: Barbara L. Chalfonte , Robert S. Fish , Robert E. Kraut, Expressive richness: a comparison of speech and text as media for revision, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Reaching through technology, p.21-26, April 27-May 02, 1991, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States [doi>10.1145/108844.108848]
• 6: Covell, M., Withgott, M. and Slaney, M. Mach1: Nonuniform time-scale modification of speech. Proc. IEEE ICASSP 1998, (1998), 493--496.
• 7: Ross Cutler , Yong Rui , Anoop Gupta , JJ Cadiz , Ivan Tashev , Li-wei He , Alex Colburn , Zhengyou Zhang , Zicheng Liu , Steve Silverberg, Distributed meetings: a meeting capture and broadcasting system, Proceedings of the tenth ACM international conference on Multimedia, December 01-06, 2002, Juan-les-Pins, France [doi>10.1145/641007.641112]
• 8: Garofolo, J., Auzanne, C.G.P. and Voorhees, E.M. The TREC-9 spoken document retrieval track: A success story. Proc. RIAO-2000, (2000).
• 9: Hays, W.L. Statistics for the Social Sciences. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973.
• 10: He, L. and Gupta, A. User benefits of non-linear time compression. Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2000-96, Microsoft, (2000).
• 11: Hejna, D. Real-time time-scale modification of speech via the synchronized overlap-add algorithm. MSc Dissertation, M.I.T., (1990).
• 12: Hori, C. and Furui, S. A new approach to automatic speech summarization. IEEE Trans. Multimedia 5, 3 (2003), 368--378.
• 13: Lin, C-W. ROUGE: A package for automatic evaluation of summaries. Proceedings of ACL 2004, (2004), 56--60.
• 14: McKeown, K., Hirschberg, J., Galley, M. and Maskey, S.. From text to speech summarization. In Proc. of ICASSP 2005, (2005).
• 15: MLMI 2005. http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/mlmi05/techprog.html.
• 16: Nelson Morgan , Don Baron , Jane Edwards , Dan Ellis , David Gelbart , Adam Janin , Thilo Pfau , Elizabeth Shriberg , Andreas Stolcke, The meeting project at ICSI, Proceedings of the first international conference on Human language technology research, p.1-7, March 18-21, 2001, San Diego [doi>10.3115/1072133.1072203]
• 17: Nenkova, A. and Passonneau, R. Evaluating content selection in summarization: the pyramid model. In Proc HLT-NAACL 2004, (2004), 145--152.
• 18: Sticht, T.G. Comprehension of repeated time-compression recordings. Journal of Experimental Education 37, 4 (1969).
• 19: Lisa J. Stifelman, Augmenting real-world objects: a paper-based audio notebook, Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.199-200, April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/257089.257279]
• 20: Tucker, S. and Whittaker, S. Accessing multimodal meeting data: systems, problems and possibilities. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3361, (2005), 1--11.
• 21: Tucker, S. and Whittaker, S. Novel techniques for time-compressing speech: An exploratory study. In Proc of ICASSP 2005, (2005).
• 22: Sunil Vemuri , Philip DeCamp , Walter Bender , Chris Schmandt, Improving speech playback using time-compression and speech recognition, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.295-302, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985730]
• 23: Voorhees, E.M. and Buckland, L.P. The Thirteenth Text REtrieval Conference Proceedings. NIST Special Publication, (2004).
• 24: Walker, M., Prasad, R. and Stent, A. A trainable generator for recommendations in multimodal dialog. In EUROSPEECH: European Conference on Speech Processing, (2003), 1697--1701.
• 25: Pierre Wellner , Mike Flynn , Simon Tucker , Steve Whittaker, A meeting browser evaluation test, CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 02-07, 2005, Portland, OR, USA [doi>10.1145/1056808.1057082]
• 26: Steve Whittaker , Julia Hirschberg , Brian Amento , Litza Stark , Michiel Bacchiani , Philip Isenhour , Larry Stead , Gary Zamchick , Aaron Rosenberg, SCANMail: a voicemail interface that makes speech browsable, readable and searchable, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Changing our world, changing ourselves, April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA [doi>10.1145/503376.503426]
• 27: Steve Whittaker , Brian Amento, Semantic speech editing, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.527-534, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985759]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

Keywords:
audio interfaces, evaluation methods, excision, meetings interfaces, speech manipulation, speech summary, speech-as-data, speed-up, summarization, temporal compression