Sushant Kafle


2019

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Modeling Acoustic-Prosodic Cues for Word Importance Prediction in Spoken Dialogues
Sushant Kafle | Cissi Ovesdotter Alm | Matt Huenerfauth
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies

Prosodic cues in conversational speech aid listeners in discerning a message. We investigate whether acoustic cues in spoken dialogue can be used to identify the importance of individual words to the meaning of a conversation turn. Individuals who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing often rely on real-time captions in live meetings. Word error rate, a traditional metric for evaluating automatic speech recognition (ASR), fails to capture that some words are more important for a system to transcribe correctly than others. We present and evaluate neural architectures that use acoustic features for 3-class word importance prediction. Our model performs competitively against state-of-the-art text-based word-importance prediction models, and it demonstrates particular benefits when operating on imperfect ASR output.

2018

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A Corpus for Modeling Word Importance in Spoken Dialogue Transcripts
Sushant Kafle | Matt Huenerfauth
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)