Developing an automatic transcription and retrieval system for spoken lectures in Turkish

Abstract

With the increase of online video lectures, using speech and language processing technologies for education has become quite important. This paper presents an automatic transcription and retrieval system developed for processing spoken lectures in Turkish. The main steps in the system are automatic transcription of Turkish video lectures using a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) system and finding keywords on the lattices obtained from the LVCSR system using a speech retrieval system based on keyword search. While developing this system, first a state-of-the-art LVCSR system was developed for Turkish using advance acoustic modeling methods, then keywords were extracted automatically from word sequences in the reference transcriptions of video lectures, and a speech retrieval system was developed for searching these keywords in the lattice output of the LVCSR system. The spoken lecture processing system yields 14.2% word error rate and 0.86 maximum term weighted value on the test data.