Videolectures are currently being digitised all over the world for its enormous value as reference resource. Many of these lectures are accompanied with slides. The slides offer a great opportunity for improving ASR systems performance. We propose a simple yet powerful extension to the linear interpolation of language models for adapting language models with slide information. Two types of slides are considered, correct slides, and slides automatic extracted from the videos with OCR. Furthermore, we compare both time aligned and unaligned slides. Results report an improvement of up to 3.8 % absolute WER points when using correct slides. Surprisingly, when using automatic slides obtained with poor OCR quality, the ASR system still improves up to 2.2 absolute WER points.

This paper describes the Automatic Speech Recognition systems built by the MLLP research group of Universitat Politècnica de València and the HLTPR research group of RWTH Aachen for the IberSpeech-RTVE 2018 Speech-to-Text Transcription Challenge. We participated in both the closed and the open training conditions. The best system built for the closed condition was an hybrid BLSTM-HMM ASR system using one-pass decoding with a combination of a RNN LM and show-adapted n-gram LMs. It was trained on a set of reliable speech data extracted from the train and dev1 sets using MLLP's transLectures-UPV toolkit (TLK) and TensorFlow. This system achieved 20.0% WER on the dev2 set. For the open condition we used approx. 3800 hours of outof-domain training data from multiple sources and trained a one-pass hybrid BLSTM-HMM ASR system using open-source tools RASR and RETURNN developed at RWTH Aachen. This system scored 15.6% WER on the dev2 set. The highlights of these systems include robust speech data filtering for acoustic model training and show-specific language modeling.

This paper describes the statistical machine translation system built by the MLLP research group of Universitat Politècnica de València for the German→English news translation shared task of the EMNLP 2018 Third Conference on Machine Translation (WMT18). We used an ensemble of Transformer architecture-based neural machine translation systems. To train our system under "constrained" conditions, we filtered the provided parallel data with a scoring technique using character-based language models, and we added parallel data based on synthetic source sentences generated from the provided monolingual corpora.

Abstract-Departing from creative learning foundations, this paper discusses on the suitability of interactive tables as a grounding technology to support creative learning for several reasons: support for social learning, because the subjects share a physical space as in traditional non-digital technologies; communication during the creative, experimental and reflexive process is direct and not computer-mediated; and subjects can carry out the task in parallel on the same surface. Considering reflection, discussion and creation processes in a loop, an experiment with teenagers has been conducted comparing a digital-based against a pure tangible tabletop in a task of creating entities consisting of blocks and joint elements. This preliminary study, designed to obtain initial insights about whether the grounding technology may become a promising tool to support creative learning, explores some aspects such as productivity, complexity of designs and concurrent comanipulation. The results showed that subjects were more productive in terms of the number of solutions obtained using the non computer-mediated approach. However using the digital tabletop approach subjects design, on average, more complex or elaborate solutions in terms of the number of involved bodies and joints. Finally, an important finding was that teams established more frequently concurrent cooperation schemes in the digital tabletop condition by sharing more effectively the creation space.

Abstract. With the spread of MOOCs and video lecture repositories it is more important than ever to have accurate methods for automatically transcribing video lectures. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective language model adaptation technique based on document retrieval from the web. This technique is combined with slide adaptation, and compared against a strong baseline language model and a stronger slideadapted baseline. These adaptation techniques are compared within two different acoustic models: a standard HMM model and the CD-DNN-HMM model. The proposed method obtains improvements on WER of up to 14% relative with respect to a competitive baseline as well as outperforming slide adaptation.