NXT meets the ICSI Corpus

Jean Carletta and Jonathan Kilgour

University of Edinburgh

HCRC Language Technology Group

ICSI Meeting Corpus

• 75 natural meetings from research groups– close-talking and far-field microphones

• orthographic transcription

• "speech quality" tags (e.g., emphasis)

• dialogue acts using MRDA

• hot spots

The NITE XML Toolkit

• library support for data handling and search using a data model that can express both timing and complex structure

• multiple file stand-off XML data storage

• some standard GUIs, data utilities

• library support for writing tailored GUIs

extract from Bdb001.A.words.xml

<w nite:id="Bdb001.w.1,342" starttime="356.39" endtime="" c="W">time</w> <w nite:id="Bdb001.w.1,343" starttime="" endtime="" c="HYPH">-</w> <w nite:id="Bdb001.w.1,344" starttime="" endtime="356.59" c="W">line</w>

extract from Bdb001.A.speech-quality.xml<speechquality nite:id="Bdb001.emphasis.16" type="emphasis"> <nite:child href="Bdb001.A.words.xml#id(Bdb001.w.1,342)..id(Bdb001.w.1,344)" /> </speechquality>

Stand-off XML

Tasks

• pre-NXT: up-translation and tokenization

• hand annotation (topic segmentation, dialogue acts, extractive summaries, ...)

• automatic annotation/indexing by query match

Queries in NXT

($a w):(TEXT($a) ~ /th.*/)::($s speechquality):($s ^ $a) && ($s@type="emphasis")

 • Find instances of words starting with “th”• For each find instances of speech quality tags of

type "emphasis" that dominate the word• Discard words that are not dominated by at least one

such tagUse queries to understand data, verify quality, index.

NXT as Meeting Browser

• Browser = display + signal indexing +

search

• NXT data displays:– synchronize with signal– highlight search results

Issues

• Already can't load all the ICSI data at once on some machines

• NXT supports display of one meeting at a time but browsing may be over several meetings

• Really complicated queries are often too slow for browser response times

Key: Pre-indexing of query results, tailored data builds

Conclusions

• NXT available, free, open source, useful in a surprising number of ways

http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/NITE