Liberated Learning Partners in Europe:
University of Southampton, UK
Overview:
Dr. Mike Wald conducted informal feasibility trials at Southampton in 1998 on the use of existing commercially available ASR software to provide a real time verbatim displayed transcript in lectures for deaf students. He identified that standard speech recognition software was unsuitable as it required the dictation of punctuation, which does not occur naturally in spontaneous speech in lectures.
Without the dictation of punctuation the ASR software produced a continuous unbroken stream of text that was very difficult to read and comprehend. Attempts to insert punctuation in real time proved unsuccessful. However reasonable accuracy could be achieved by speaking clearly and carefully after extensively training the system by reading the training scripts and teaching the system any new vocabulary that was not already in the dictionary.
When Dr Wald learned that feasibility trials were also being conducted at Saint Mary's University, Nova Scotia, Canada; he contacted Dr David Leitch and a long standing collaboration began. Dr Wald became the International Member of the Liberated Learning advisory committee and chair of the research committee. He continues to work with IBM and Liberated Learning to investigate how ASR can make speech more accessible.
Dr Wald's current LL related research at Southampton includes:
- Developing a Real-Time Editing application to enable a human intermediary to improve accuracy by correcting mistakes as they are made by the ASR software.
- Developing a client-server system to provide users with their own personal display customized to their preferences. This also enables the ASR transcriptions of multiple speakers, using multiple ASR systems, to be displayed.
- Research into the effect on readability of error rate and type, punctuation and text formatting and display modes.
- Research into the efficiency of creating accurately captioned multimedia using ASR.
Contact:
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, Highfield
Southampton
United Kingdom
SO171BJ
University of Southampton Website: http://www.soton.ac.uk/
School of Electronics and Computer Science Website: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk
Learning Technologies Group Website: http://www.ltg.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
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