Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) replace paper flight strips through different digital solutions. The instructed commands from an air traffic controller (ATCos) are then available in computer readable form. However, those systems require manual controller inputs, i.e. ATCos' workload increases. The Active Listening Assistant (AcListant®) project has shown that Assistant Based Speech Recognition (ABSR) is a potential solution to reduce this additional workload. However, the development of an ABSR application for a specific targetdomain usually requires a large amount of manually transcribed audio data in order to achieve task-sufficient recognition accuracies. MALORCA project developed an initial basic ABSR system and semi-automatically tailored its recognition models for both Prague and Vienna approaches by machine learning from automatically transcribed audio data. Command recognition error rates were reduced from 7.9% to under 0.6% for Prague and from 18.9% to 3.2% for Vienna.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has recently proved to be a useful tool to reduce the workload of air traffic controllers leading to significant gains in operational efficiency. Air Traffic Control (ATC) systems in operation rooms around the world generate large amounts of untranscribed speech and radar data each day, which can be utilized to build and improve ASR models. In this paper, we propose an iterative approach that utilizes increasing amounts of untranscribed data to incrementally build the necessary ASR models for an ATC operational area. Our approach uses a semi-supervised learning framework to combine speech and radar data to iteratively update the acoustic model, language model and command prediction model (i.e. prediction of possible commands from radar data for a given air traffic situation) of an ASR system. Starting with seed models built with a limited amount of manually transcribed data, we simulate an operational scenario to adapt and improve the models through semi-supervised learning. Experiments on two independent ATC areas (Vienna and Prague) demonstrate the utility of our proposed methodology that can scale to operational environments with minimal manual effort for learning and adaptation.

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In this paper we propose a novel virtual simulation-pilot engine for speeding up air traffic controller (ATCo) training by integrating different state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools. The virtual simulation-pilot engine receives spoken communications from ATCo trainees, and it performs automatic speech recognition and understanding. Thus, it goes beyond only transcribing the communication and can also understand its meaning. The output is subsequently sent to a response generator system, which resembles the spoken read-back that pilots give to the ATCo trainees. The overall pipeline is composed of the following submodules: (i) an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that transforms audio into a sequence of words; (ii) a high-level air traffic control (ATC)-related entity parser that understands the transcribed voice communication; and (iii) a text-to-speech submodule that generates a spoken utterance that resembles a pilot based on the situation of the dialogue. Our system employs state-of-the-art AI-based tools such as Wav2Vec 2.0, Conformer, BERT and Tacotron models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work fully based on open-source ATC resources and AI tools. In addition, we develop a robust and modular system with optional submodules that can enhance the system’s performance by incorporating real-time surveillance data, metadata related to exercises (such as sectors or runways), or even a deliberate read-back error to train ATCo trainees to identify them. Our ASR system can reach as low as 5.5% and 15.9% absolute word error rates (WER) on high- and low-quality ATC audio. We also demonstrate that adding surveillance data into the ASR can yield a callsign detection accuracy of more than 96%.

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