Proceedings of the

DARPA
Broadcast News Workshop

February 28-March 3, 1999

Hilton at Washington Dulles Airport
Herndon, Virginia

Abstracts

Author Index

Overview

Session Chair: Lynette Hirschman, MITRE

• 1998 Broadcast News Benchmark Test Results, David S. Pallett, Jonathan G. Fiscus, John S. Garofolo, Alvin Martin, Mark A. Przybocki: NIST.

• 1998 Hub-4 Information Extraction Evaluation, Mark A. Przybocki, Jonathan G. Fiscus, John S. Garofolo, David S. Pallett: NIST.

• NIST's 1998 Topic Detection and Tracking Evaluation (TDT2), Jonathan G. Fiscus, George Doddington, John S. Garofolo, Alvin Martin: NIST.

Information Extraction

Session Chair: Ralph Grishman, NYU

• Overview: Information Extraction from Broadcast News, Patricia Robinson, Erica Brown, John D. Burger, Nancy Chinchor, Aaron Douthat, Lisa Ferro, Lynette Hirschman: MITRE/SAIC.

• Studies in Data Annotation Effectiveness, Michael R. Crystal, Francis Kubala, Robert MacIntyre: BBN.

• Named Entity Extraction from Broadcast News, David Miller, Richard Schwartz, Ralph Weischedel, Rebecca Stone: BBN.

• Information Extraction from Broadcast News Speech Data, David D. Palmer, John D. Burger, Mari Ostendorf: MITRE/Boston Univ..

• Baseline IE-NE Experiments Using the SPRACH/LASIE System, Steve Renals, Yoshi Gotoh, Robert Gaizauskas, Mark Stevenson: University of Sheffield.

• Named Entity Extraction from Speech: Approach and Results Using the TextPro System, Douglas E. Appelt, David Martin: SRI International.

TDT: Segmentation

Session Chair: James Allan, U. Mass.

• The TDT-2 Text and Speech Corpus, Chris Cieri, David Graff, Mark Liberman, Nii Martey, Stephanie Strassel: Univ. of Pennsylvania Linguistic Data Consortium.

• Combining Words and Speech Prosody for Automatic Topic Segmentation, Andreas Stolcke, Elizabeth Shriberg, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gokhan Tur, Ze'ev Rivlin, Kemal Sonmez: SRI International.

• Story Segmentation and Topic Detection in the Broadcast News Domain, S. Dharanipragada, M. Franz, Jeffrey S. McCarley, S. Roukos, Todd Ward: IBM.

• A Cluster-Based Approach to Tracking, Detection, and Segmentation of Broadcast News, D. Eichmann, Miguel Ruiz, Padmini Srinivasan, Nick Street, Chris Culy, Filippo Menczer: Univ. of Iowa.

• Segmentation of Automatically Transcribed Broadcast News Text, P. van Mulbregt, Ira Carp, Larry Gillick, Stephen A. Lowe, Jonathan P. Yamron: Dragon Systems.

Speech 1: Overview and Baselines

Session Chair: Ananth Sankar, SRI

• Broadcast News is Good News, Francis Kubala: BBN.

• Recent Improvements to IBM's Speech Recognition System for Automatic Transcription of Broadcast News, Scott S. Chen, Ellen Eide, M.J.F. Gales, Ramesh A. Gopinath, D. Kanevsky, P. Olsen: IBM.

• Automatic Modeling of Pronunciation Variations, Ellen Eide: IBM.

• The LIMSI 1998 Hub-4E Transcription System, Jean-Luc Gauvain, Lori Lamel, Gilles Adda, Michele Jardino: LIMSI-CNRS.

• The 1998 OGI-Fonix Broadcast News Transcription System, Xintian Wu, Chaojun Liu, Yonghong Yan, Doughwa Kim, Seth Cameron, Randy Parr: OGI/Fonix.

TDT: Detection and Tracking 1

Session Chair: Rich Schwartz, BBN

• UMASS Approaches to Detection and Tracking at TDT2, Ron Papka, James Allan, Victor Lavrenko: Univ. of Mass..

• CMU Report on TDT-2: Segmentation, Detection and Tracking, Jaime Carbonell, Yiming Yang, John Lafferty, Ralf D. Brown, Tom Pierce, Xintian Liu: CMU.

• GE Tracker: A Robust, Lightweight Topic Tracking System, Tomek Strzalkowski, Gees C. Stein, G. Bowden Wise: GE Corporate R&D.

• The Beta-Binomial Mixture Model and its Application to TDT Tracking and Detection, Stephen A. Lowe: Dragon Systems.

• Topic Tracking in a News Stream, Jonathan P. Yamron, Ira Carp, Larry Gillick, Stephen A. Lowe, P. van Mulbregt: Dragon Systems.

Related Work 1

Session Chair: John Garofolo, NIST

• Audio-Visual Speaker Recognition for Video Broadcast News, Chalapathy Neti, Andrew Senior: IBM.

• Recent Improvements in Voicemail Transcription, George Zweig, G. Saon, Mukund Padmanabhan, J. Huang, S. Basu: IBM.

Speech 2: Baselines and Non-English

Session Chair: Andreas Stolcke, SRI

• The Philips/RWTH System for Transcription of Broadcast News, P. Beyerlein, X. Aubert, R. Haeb-Umbach, M. Harris, Dietrich Klakow, A. Wendemuth, Sirko Molau, Michael Pitz, A. Sixtus: Philips Research Lab, Germany/Aachen Univ..

• Automatic Transcription Verification of Broadcast News and Similar Speech Corpora, Michael Pitz, Sirko Molau, Ralf Schluter, Hermann Ney: RWTH Aachen.

• An Overview of the SPRACH System for the Transcription of Broadcast News, Gary Cook, James Christie, Dan Ellis, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Yoshi Gotoh, Brian Kingsbury, Nelson Morgan, Steve Renals, Tony Robinson, Gethin Williams: Cambridge Univ./ICSI/Sheffield Univ.

• Reducing Errors by Increasing the Error Rate: MLP Acoustic Modeling for Broadcast News Transcription, Nelson Morgan, Dan Ellis, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Adam Janin, Brian Kingsbury: International Computer Science Institute.

• Not just what, but also when: Guided Automatic Pronunciation Modeling for Broadcast News, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Gethin Williams: International Computer Science Institute/Sheffield Univ.

• The 1998 Carnegie Mellon University Sphinx-3 Spanish Broadcast News Transcription System, Juan M. Huerta, Stanley Chen, Richard M. Stern: CMU.

• The IBM LVCSR System Used for 1998 Mandarin Broadcast News Transcription Evaluation, XueFeng Guo, WeiBin Zhu, Qin Shi, Scott S. Chen, Ramesh A. Gopinath: IBM China Research Lab.

• Dragon Systems' 1998 Broadcast News Transcription System for Mandarin, Puming Zhan, Steven Wegmann, Larry Gillick: Dragon Systems.

TDT: Detection and Tracking 2

Session Chair: Ralf Brown, CMU

• Topic Detection and Tracking Using idf-Weighted Cosine Coefficient, J. Michael Schultz, Mark Liberman: Univ. of Penn.

• Topic Detection in Broadcast News, Frederick Walls, Hubert Jin, Sreenivasa Sista, Richard Schwartz: BBN Technologies.

• Topic Tracking for Radio, TV Broadcast, and Newswire, Hubert Jin, Richard Schwartz, Sreenivasa Sista, Frederick Walls: BBN Technologies.

• A Description of the CIDR System as Used for TDT-2, Dragomir Radev, Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, Kathleen R. McKeown: Columbia Univ.

• Topic Tracking with the PRISE Information Retrieval System, Douglas W. Oard: Univ. of Maryland.

Related Work 2

Session Chair: Dave Pallett, NIST

• 1998 TREC-7 Spoken Document Retrieval Track Overview and Results, John S. Garofolo, Ellen M. Voorhees, Cedric G. P. Auzanne, Vincent M. Stanford, Bruce Lund: NIST.

• AT&T at TREC-7 SDR Track, Amit Singhal, John Choi, Donald Hindle, Julia Hirschberg, Fernando Pereira, Steve Whittaker: AT&T Labs-Research.

• Improvements in Japanese Broadcast News Transcription, Katsutoshi Ohtsuki, Sadaoki Furui, Naoyuki Sakurai, Atushi Iwasaki, Zhi-Peng Zhang: Tokyo Institute of Technology/NTT.

• Human Language Technologies Evaluation in the European Framework, J. Mariani, P. Paroubek: LIMSI-CNRS.

New Directions

Session Chair: John Makoul, BBN

• Event99: A Proposed Event Indexing Task for Broadcast News, Lynette Hirschman, Erica Brown, Nancy Chinchor, Aaron Douthat, Lisa Ferro, Ralph Grishman, Patricia Robinson, Beth Sundheim: MITRE/SAIC/NYU/SPAWAR.

• Performance Measures for Information Extraction, John Makhoul, Francis Kubala, Richard Schwartz, Ralph Weischedel: BBN Technologies.

Speech 3: 10x RT (incl. Baselines)

Session Chair: Lori Lamel, LIMSI-CNRS

• The 1998 BBN BYBLOS Primary System Applied to English and Spanish Broadcast News Transcription, Spyros Matsoukas, Long Nguyen, Jason Davenport, Jay Billa, Fred Richardson, Manhung Siu, Daben Liu, Richard Schwartz, John Makhoul: BBN Technologies.

• The 1998 BBN BYBLOS 10x Real Time System, Jason Davenport, Long Nguyen, Spyros Matsoukas, Richard Schwartz, John Makhoul: BBN Technologies.

• The 1998 HTK Broadcast News Transcription System: Development and Results, P.C. Woodland, T. Hain, G.L. Moore, T.R. Niesler, D. Povey, Andreas Tuerk, E.W.D. Whittaker: Cambridge Univ.

• The CUHTK-Entropic 10xRT Broadcast News Transcription System, Julian J. Odell, P.C. Woodland, T. Hain: Entropic Ltd./Cambridge Univ.

• Dragon Systems' 1998 Broadcast News Transcription System, Steven Wegmann, Puming Zhan, Ira Carp, Michael Newman, Jonathan P. Yamron, Larry Gillick: Dragon Systems.

• SRI's 1998 Broadcast News System - Toward Faster, Better, Smaller Speech Recognition, Ananth Sankar, Ramana Rao Gadde, Fuliang Weng: SRI International.