Patent ID: 6442518
Filing Date: 2002-08-27
Classification: G10L

Abstract:
An apparatus for automatically aligning closed captions, comprising:an audio classifier unit, for receiving audio data and identifying portions of the audio data that comprise speech data; a speech rate control unit, coupled to the audio classifier unit for outputting the portions of the audio data that include speech, adjusts the speech data rate such that an operator can more easily perform transcription; a time event tracker unit, coupled to the audio speed control unit, for receiving the speech portions of the audio data and for receiving a transcription of the speech portions of the audio data that is generated by the operator, the time event tracker unit also for inserting time stamps in the transcription that indicate the time when portions of the transcription were generated by the operator and the time stamped transcription being output as a roughly aligned closed caption stream; and a re-aligner unit for precisely aligning the roughly aligned closed caption stream in a non-recursive manner, wherein the re-aligner unit comprises a captions re-aligner unit that receives the roughly aligned closed caption stream and the associated audio data stream and segments both streams into sections based upon a threshold duration between the time stamps in the roughly aligned closed caption stream, the captions re-aligner unit also breaking each section into a number of chunks and generating a language model using only the words contained in each chunk, the captions re-aligner unit using the language model to perform a speech recognition operation on the audio data stream and to generate a hypothesized word list, a plurality of time stamps in the roughly aligned closed caption stream being modified to aligning with a plurality of time stamps in the hypothesized word list.