In this paper, we describe the automatic reconstruction of literal transcriptions for medical dictations from a non-literal transcription and an automatically recognized speech transcript by phonetic similarity matching and alignment. We present a customized phonetic similarity measure which is trained on a set of phonetically similar string pairs, returns interpretable alignment results, and is robust in its application. Furthermore, we introduce exible automatic phonetic transcription with regular expressions to deal with formatted entities in written texts and alternative pronunciations in recognized texts. In an evaluation, our method reduced the word error rate for the reconstructed transcription by 12% relative.
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a valuable tool in large document production environments like medical dictation. While manual post-processing is still needed for correcting speech recognition errors and for creating documents which adhere to various stylistic and formatting conventions, a large part of the document production process is carried out by the ASR system. For improving the quality of the system output, knowledge about the multi-layered relationship between the dictated texts and the final documents is required. Thus, typical speechrecognition errors can be avoided, and proper style and formatting can be anticipated in the ASR part of the document production process. Yet -while vast amounts of recognition results and manually edited final reports are constantly being produced -the error-free literal transcripts of the actually dictated texts are a scarce and costly resource because they have to be created by manually transcribing the audio files.To obtain large corpora of literal transcripts for medical dictation, we propose a method for automatically reconstructing them from draft speech-recognition transcripts plus the corresponding final medical reports. The main innovative aspect of our method is the combination of two independent knowledge sources: phonetic information for the identification of speech-recognition errors and semantic information for detecting post-editing concerning format and style. Speech recognition results and final reports are first aligned, then properly matched based on semantic and phonetic similarity, and finally categorised and selectively combined into a reconstruction hypothesis. This method can be used for various applications in language technology, e.g., adaptation for ASR, document production, or generally for the development of parallel text corpora of non-literal text resources. In an Preprint submitted to Elsevier 5 July 2010
*ManuscriptPage 2 of 38 A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 experimental evaluation, which also includes an assessment of the quality of the reconstructed transcripts compared to manual transcriptions, the described method results in a relative word error rate reduction of 7.74% after retraining the standard language model with reconstructed transcripts.
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