A novel strategy for fine-grained semantic verification of civil aviation radiotelephony read-backs

Abstract

During the flight of the aircraft, the pilot must repeat the instruction sent by the controller, and the controller must further confirm these read-backs, in this way to further ensure the safety of air transportation. However, fatigue, tension, negligence and other human factors may prevent the controller from realizing read-back errors in time, which is a huge hidden danger for the safety of civil aviation transportation. This paper proposes a novel strategy to implement fine-grained semantic verification of radiotelephony read-backs by introducing interaction layer and attention mechanism at the output of BiLSTM model. Compared with the traditional two-channel verification strategy, the interaction layer is added to obtain fine-grained semantic matching relation representation, rather than connecting the BiLSTM output vectors to obtain the overall semantic representation of the sentence. And by adding attention layer, the new strategy can capture the potential semantic relation between the read-backs and the instructions, which is applicable to non-standard diction and abbreviated read-backs in real radiotelephony communications. Extensive experiments are conducted and the results show that the proposed new strategy is more effective than the traditional method for read-backs checking, and the average test accuracy of the new strategy based on the Chinese ATC radiotelephony read-backs corpus can reach 93.03%.