Meeting transcript:
speaker: C
text: Yeah , we had a long discussion about how much w how easy we want to make it for people to bleep things out .
speaker: C
text: So <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Morgan wants to make it hard .
speaker: D
text: It <disfmarker> it doesn't <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Did <disfmarker> did <disfmarker> did it <disfmarker> ?
speaker: C
text: I didn't even check yesterday whether it was moving .
speaker: D
text: It didn't move yesterday either when I started it .
speaker: C
text: So .
speaker: D
text: So I don't know if it doesn't like both of us <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Channel three ?
speaker: C
text: Channel three ?
speaker: D
text: You know , I discovered something yesterday on these , um , wireless ones .
speaker: B
text: Channel two .
speaker: C
text: Mm - hmm ?
speaker: D
text: You can tell if it 's picking up <pause> breath noise and stuff .
speaker: C
text: Yeah ,
speaker: C
text: it has a little indicator on it <disfmarker> on the AF .
speaker: D
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: D
text: So if you <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: yeah , if you breathe under <disfmarker> breathe and then you see AF go off , then you know <pause> it 's p picking up your mouth noise .
speaker: F
text: Oh , that 's good .
speaker: F
text: Cuz we have a lot of breath noises .
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: C
text: Test .
speaker: F
text: In fact , if you listen to just the channels of people not talking , it 's like " @ @ " .
speaker: F
text: It 's very disgust
speaker: C
text: What ?
speaker: C
text: Did you see Hannibal recently or something ?
speaker: F
text: Sorry .
speaker: F
text: Exactly .
speaker: F
text: It 's very disconcerting .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: F
text: So , um ,
speaker: F
text: I was gonna try to get out of here , like , in half an hour ,
speaker: F
text: um ,
speaker: F
text: cuz I really appreciate people coming ,
speaker: F
text: and <vocalsound> the main thing that I was gonna ask people to help with today is <pause> to give input on what kinds of database format we should <pause> use in starting to link up things like word transcripts and annotations of word transcripts ,
speaker: F
text: so anything that transcribers or discourse coders or whatever put in the signal , <vocalsound> with time - marks for , like , words and phone boundaries and all the stuff we get out of the forced alignments and the recognizer .
speaker: F
text: So , we have this , um <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I think a starting point is clearly the <disfmarker> the channelized <pause> output of Dave Gelbart 's program ,
speaker: F
text: which Don brought a copy of ,
speaker: C
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: Yeah , I 'm <disfmarker> I 'm familiar with that .
speaker: C
text: I mean , we <disfmarker> I sort of already have developed an XML format for this sort of stuff .
speaker: F
text: um ,
speaker: F
text: which <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: Can I see it ?
speaker: C
text: And so the only question <disfmarker> is it the sort of thing that you want to use or not ?
speaker: C
text: Have you looked at that ?
speaker: C
text: I mean , I had a web page up .
speaker: F
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: So ,
speaker: F
text: I actually mostly need to be able to link up , or <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: So <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I it 's <disfmarker> it 's a question both of what the representation is and <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: You mean , this <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I guess I am gonna be standing up and drawing on the board .
speaker: F
text: OK ,
speaker: F
text: yeah .
speaker: F
text: So you should , definitely .
speaker: C
text: Um , so <disfmarker> so it definitely had that as a concept .
speaker: C
text: So tha it has a single time - line ,
speaker: F
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: C
text: and then you can have lots of different sections ,
speaker: C
text: each of which have I Ds attached to it ,
speaker: C
text: and then you can refer from other sections to those I Ds ,
speaker: C
text: if you want to .
speaker: C
text: So that ,
speaker: C
text: um <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: so that you start with <disfmarker> with a time - line tag .
speaker: C
text: " Time - line " .
speaker: C
text: And then you have a bunch of times .
speaker: C
text: I don't e I don't remember exactly what my notation was ,
speaker: A
text: Oh , I remember seeing an example of this .
speaker: C
text: but it <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Right ,
speaker: F
text: right .
speaker: A
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: Yeah ,
speaker: C
text: " T equals one point three two " ,
speaker: C
text: uh <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: And then I <disfmarker> I also had optional things like accuracy ,
speaker: C
text: and then " ID equals T one , uh , one seven " .
speaker: C
text: And then , <nonvocalsound> I also wanted to <disfmarker> to be i to be able to not specify specifically what the time was and just have a stamp .
speaker: F
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: Yeah , so these are arbitrary , assigned by a program ,
speaker: C
text: not <disfmarker> not by a user .
speaker: C
text: So you have a whole bunch of those .
speaker: C
text: And then somewhere la further down you might have something like an utterance tag
speaker: C
text: which has " start equals T - seventeen ,
speaker: C
text: end equals T - eighteen " .
speaker: C
text: So what that 's saying is , we know it starts at this particular time .
speaker: C
text: We don't know when it ends .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: C
text: Right ?
speaker: C
text: But it ends at this T - eighteen ,
speaker: C
text: which may be somewhere else .
speaker: C
text: We say there 's another utterance .
speaker: C
text: We don't know what the t time actually is
speaker: C
text: but we know that it 's the same time as this end time .
speaker: A
text: Mmm .
speaker: C
text: You know , thirty - eight ,
speaker: C
text: whatever you want .
speaker: A
text: So you 're essentially defining a lattice .
speaker: C
text: OK .
speaker: C
text: Yes ,
speaker: C
text: exactly .
speaker: A
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: And then , uh <disfmarker> and then these also have I Ds .
speaker: C
text: Right ?
speaker: C
text: So you could <disfmarker> you could have some sort of other <disfmarker> other tag later in the file that would be something like , um , oh , I don't know , <comment> uh , <nonvocalsound> " noise - type equals <nonvocalsound> door - slam " .
speaker: C
text: You know ?
speaker: C
text: And then , uh , <nonvocalsound> you could either say " time equals a particular time - mark " or you could do other sorts of references .
speaker: C
text: So <disfmarker> or <disfmarker> or you might have a prosody <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: " Prosody "
speaker: C
text: right ? D ? T ?
speaker: C
text: D ? T ?
speaker: C
text: T ?
speaker: F
text: It 's an O instead of an I ,
speaker: F
text: but the D is good .
speaker: C
text: You like the D ?
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: That 's a good D .
speaker: C
text: Um ,
speaker: C
text: you know , so you could have some sort of type here ,
speaker: C
text: and then you could have ,
speaker: C
text: um <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: the utterance that it 's referring to could be U - seventeen or something like that .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: F
text: So ,
speaker: F
text: I mean , that seems <disfmarker> that seems g great for all of the encoding of things with time
speaker: F
text: and ,
speaker: C
text: Oh , well .
speaker: F
text: um <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I <disfmarker> I guess my question is more , uh , what d what do you do with , say , a forced alignment ?
speaker: A
text: How - how
speaker: F
text: I mean you 've got all these phone labels ,
speaker: F
text: and what do you do if you <disfmarker> just conceptually , if you get , um , transcriptions where the words are staying but the time boundaries are changing , cuz you 've got a new recognition output ,
speaker: F
text: or s sort of <disfmarker> what 's the , um , sequence of going from the waveforms that stay the same , the transcripts that may or may not change , and then the utterance which <disfmarker> where the time boundaries that may or may not change <disfmarker> ?
speaker: A
text: Oh , that 's <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: That 's actually very nicely handled here
speaker: F
text: Um .
speaker: A
text: because you could <disfmarker> you could <disfmarker> all you 'd have to change is the , <vocalsound> um , time - stamps in the time - line without <disfmarker> without , uh , changing the I Ds .
speaker: F
text: And you 'd be able to propagate all of the <disfmarker> the information ?
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: That 's , the who that 's why you do that extra level of indirection .
speaker: C
text: So that you can just change the time - line .
speaker: A
text: Except the time - line is gonna be huge .
speaker: A
text: If you say <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Yes .
speaker: F
text: Yeah ,
speaker: F
text: yeah , especially at the phone - level .
speaker: A
text: suppose you have a phone - level alignment .
speaker: F
text: The <disfmarker> we <disfmarker> we have phone - level backtraces .
speaker: A
text: You 'd have <disfmarker> you 'd have <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Yeah , this <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I don't think I would do this for phone - level .
speaker: F
text: Um <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I think for phone - level you want to use some sort of binary representation
speaker: C
text: because it 'll be too dense otherwise .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: F
text: So , if you were doing that and you had this sort of companion , uh , thing that gets called up for phone - level , uh , what would that look like ?
speaker: F
text: How would you <disfmarker> ?
speaker: C
text: I would use just an existing <disfmarker> an existing way of doing it .
speaker: A
text: Why
speaker: A
text: Mmm .
speaker: A
text: But <disfmarker> but why not use it for phone - level ?
speaker: F
text: H h
speaker: A
text: It 's just a matter of <disfmarker> it 's just a matter of it being bigger .
speaker: A
text: But if you have <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: you know , barring memory limitations , or uh <disfmarker> I w I mean this is still the m
speaker: C
text: It 's parsing limitations .
speaker: C
text: I don't want to have this text file that you have to read in the whole thing to do something very simple for .
speaker: A
text: Oh , no .
speaker: A
text: You would use it only <pause> for <pause> purposes where you actually want the phone - level information , I 'd imagine .
speaker: F
text: So you could have some file that configures how much information you want in your <disfmarker> in your XML or something .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: I mean , you 'd <disfmarker> y
speaker: F
text: Um ,
speaker: F
text: cuz th it does get very bush with <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I <disfmarker> I am imagining you 'd have multiple versions of this depending on the information that you want .
speaker: A
text: You <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: Um ,
speaker: C
text: I 'm just <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: what I 'm wondering is whether <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I think for word - level , this would be OK .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: For word - level , it 's alright .
speaker: F
text: Definitely .
speaker: A
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: C
text: For lower than word - level , you 're talking about so much data that I just <disfmarker> I don't know .
speaker: C
text: I don't know if that <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I mean , we actually have <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: So , one thing that Don is doing , is we 're <disfmarker> we 're running <disfmarker> For every frame , you get a pitch value ,
speaker: D
text: Lattices are big , too .
speaker: F
text: and not only one pitch value but different kinds of pitch values
speaker: F
text: depending on <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Yeah , I mean , for something like that I would use P - file
speaker: C
text: or <disfmarker> or any frame - level stuff I would use P - file .
speaker: F
text: Meaning <disfmarker> ?
speaker: C
text: Uh , that 's a <disfmarker> well , or something like it .
speaker: C
text: It 's ICS uh , ICSI has a format for frame - level representation of features .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: C
text: Um .
speaker: F
text: That you could call <disfmarker> that you would tie into this representation with like an ID .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: Or <disfmarker> or there 's a <disfmarker> there 's a particular way in XML to refer to external resources .
speaker: F
text: And <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: C
text: So you would say " refer to this external file " .
speaker: C
text: Um ,
speaker: C
text: so that external file wouldn't be in <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: So that might <disfmarker> that might work .
speaker: D
text: But what <disfmarker> what 's the advantage of doing that versus just putting it into this format ?
speaker: C
text: More compact ,
speaker: C
text: which I think is <disfmarker> is better .
speaker: D
text: Uh - huh .
speaker: C
text: I mean , if you did it at this <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I mean these are long meetings
speaker: F
text: and with <disfmarker> for every frame ,
speaker: C
text: You don't want to do it with that <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: um <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Anything at frame - level you had better encode binary
speaker: C
text: or it 's gonna be really painful .
speaker: A
text: Or you just compre
speaker: A
text: I mean , I like text formats .
speaker: A
text: Um ,
speaker: A
text: b you can always , uh , G - zip them ,
speaker: A
text: and , um , you know , c decompress them on the fly if y if space is really a concern .
speaker: D
text: Yeah , I was thi
speaker: D
text: I was thinking the advantage is that we can share this with other people .
speaker: C
text: Well , but if you 're talking about one per frame , you 're talking about gigabyte - size files .
speaker: C
text: You 're gonna actually run out of space in your filesystem for one file .
speaker: F
text: These are big files .
speaker: F
text: These are really <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I mean <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Right ?
speaker: C
text: Because you have a two - gigabyte limit on most O Ss .
speaker: A
text: Right ,
speaker: A
text: OK .
speaker: A
text: I would say <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: OK , so frame - level is probably not a good idea .
speaker: F
text: And th it 's <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: But for phone - level stuff it 's perfectly <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Like phones , or syllables , or anything like that .
speaker: F
text: Phones are every five frames though ,
speaker: F
text: so .
speaker: F
text: Or something like that .
speaker: A
text: But <disfmarker> but <disfmarker> but most of the frames are actually not speech .
speaker: A
text: So ,
speaker: A
text: you know , people don't <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Yeah ,
speaker: A
text: v Look at it , words times the average <disfmarker> The average number of phones in an English word is , I don't know , <comment> five maybe ?
speaker: F
text: but we actually <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: So , look at it , t number of words times five .
speaker: F
text: Oh , so you mean pause phones take up a lot of the <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: That 's not <disfmarker> that not <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: long pause phones .
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: A
text: Exactly .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: A
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: That 's true .
speaker: F
text: But you do have to keep them in there .
speaker: F
text: Y yeah .
speaker: C
text: So I think it <disfmarker> it 's debatable whether you want to do phone - level in the same thing .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: C
text: But I think , a anything at frame - level , even P - file , is too verbose .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: F
text: So <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I would use something tighter than P - files .
speaker: F
text: Do you <disfmarker> Are you familiar with it ?
speaker: C
text: So .
speaker: F
text: I haven't seen this particular format ,
speaker: A
text: I mean , I 've <disfmarker> I 've used them .
speaker: F
text: but <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: I don't know what their structure is .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: A
text: I 've forgot what the str
speaker: D
text: But , wait a minute ,
speaker: D
text: P - file for each frame is storing a vector of cepstral or PLP values ,
speaker: D
text: right ?
speaker: C
text: It 's whatever you want , actually .
speaker: D
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: So that <disfmarker> what 's nice about the P - file <disfmarker> It <disfmarker> i
speaker: C
text: Built into it is the concept of <pause> frames , utterances , sentences , that sort of thing , that structure .
speaker: C
text: And then also attached to it is an arbitrary vector of values .
speaker: F
text: Oh .
speaker: C
text: And it can take different types .
speaker: C
text: So it <disfmarker> th they don't all have to be floats .
speaker: C
text: You know , you can have integers and you can have doubles , and all that sort of stuff .
speaker: F
text: So that <disfmarker> that sounds <disfmarker> that sounds about what I w
speaker: C
text: Um .
speaker: C
text: Right ?
speaker: C
text: And it has a header <disfmarker> it has a header format that <pause> describes it <pause> to some extent .
speaker: C
text: So ,
speaker: C
text: the only problem with it is it 's actually storing the <pause> utterance numbers and the <pause> frame numbers in the file ,
speaker: C
text: even though they 're always sequential .
speaker: C
text: And so it does waste a lot of space .
speaker: A
text: Hmm .
speaker: C
text: But it 's still a lot tighter than <disfmarker> than ASCII .
speaker: C
text: And we have a lot of tools already to deal with it .
speaker: F
text: You do ?
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: F
text: Is there some documentation on this somewhere ?
speaker: C
text: Yeah ,
speaker: C
text: there 's a ton of it .
speaker: F
text: OK ,
speaker: F
text: great .
speaker: C
text: Man - pages and , uh , source code , and me .
speaker: F
text: So ,
speaker: F
text: I mean , that sounds good .
speaker: F
text: I <disfmarker> I was just looking for something <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I 'm not a database person ,
speaker: F
text: but something sort of standard enough that , you know , if we start using this we can give it out ,
speaker: F
text: other people can work on it ,
speaker: C
text: Yeah , it 's not standard .
speaker: F
text: or <disfmarker> <comment> Is it <disfmarker> ?
speaker: C
text: I mean , it 's something that we developed at ICSI .
speaker: C
text: But , uh <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: But it 's <pause> been used here
speaker: C
text: But it 's been used here
speaker: F
text: and people 've <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: and <disfmarker> and , you know , we have a <pause> well - configured system that you can distribute for free ,
speaker: C
text: and <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: I mean , it must be the equivalent of whatever you guys used to store feat your computed features in , right ?
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: A
text: Yeah ,
speaker: A
text: th we have <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Actually , we <disfmarker> we use a generalization of the <disfmarker> the Sphere format .
speaker: D
text: Mmm .
speaker: A
text: Um ,
speaker: A
text: but <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Yeah , so there is something like that
speaker: A
text: but it 's , um , probably not as sophist
speaker: D
text: And I think there 's <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Well , what does H T K do for features ?
speaker: C
text: Or does it even have a concept of features ?
speaker: A
text: They ha it has its own <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: I mean , Entropic has their own feature format that 's called , like , S - SD or some so SF or something like that .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: D
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: I 'm just wondering , would it be worth while to use that instead ?
speaker: A
text: Hmm ?
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: Th - this is exactly the kind of decision <disfmarker> It 's just whatever <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: But , I mean , people don't typically share this kind of stuff , right ?
speaker: A
text: Right .
speaker: D
text: I mean <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: They generate their own .
speaker: F
text: Actually , I <disfmarker> I just <disfmarker> you know , we <disfmarker> we 've done this stuff on prosodics
speaker: D
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: and three or four places have asked for those prosodic files ,
speaker: F
text: and we just have an ASCII , uh , output of frame - by - frame .
speaker: C
text: Ah , right .
speaker: F
text: Which is fine ,
speaker: F
text: but it gets unwieldy to go in and <disfmarker> and query these files with really huge files .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: I mean , we could do it .
speaker: F
text: I was just thinking if there 's something that <disfmarker> where all the frame values are <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: And a and again , if you have a <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Hmm ?
speaker: C
text: if you have a two - hour - long meeting , that 's gonna <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: They 're <disfmarker> they 're fair they 're quite large .
speaker: F
text: And these are for ten - minute Switchboard conversations ,
speaker: C
text: Yeah , I mean , they 'd be emo enormous .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: and <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: So it 's doable ,
speaker: F
text: it 's just that you can only store a feature vector at frame - by - frame
speaker: F
text: and it doesn't have any kind of ,
speaker: F
text: um <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: Is <disfmarker> is the sharing part of this a pretty important <pause> consideration
speaker: D
text: or does that just sort of , uh <disfmarker> a nice thing to have ?
speaker: F
text: I <disfmarker> I don't know enough about what we 're gonna do with the data .
speaker: F
text: But I thought it would be good to get something that we can <disfmarker> that other people can use or adopt for their own kinds of encoding .
speaker: F
text: And just , I mean we have to use some we have to make some decision about what to do .
speaker: C
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: And especially for the prosody work , what <disfmarker> what it ends up being is you get features from the signal ,
speaker: F
text: and of course those change every time your alignments change .
speaker: F
text: So you re - run a recognizer ,
speaker: F
text: you want to recompute your features , um , and then keep the database up to date .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: Or you change a word , or you change a <vocalsound> utterance boundary segment , which is gonna happen a lot .
speaker: F
text: And so I wanted something where <pause> all of this can be done in a elegant way
speaker: F
text: and that if somebody wants to try something or compute something else , that it can be done flexibly .
speaker: F
text: Um ,
speaker: F
text: it doesn't have to be pretty ,
speaker: F
text: it just has to be , you know , easy to use , and <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Yeah , the other thing <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: We should look at ATLAS ,
speaker: C
text: the NIST thing ,
speaker: F
text: Oh .
speaker: A
text: Mmm .
speaker: C
text: and see if they have anything at that level .
speaker: F
text: Uh <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I mean , I 'm not sure what to do about this with ATLAS ,
speaker: C
text: because they chose a different route .
speaker: C
text: I chose something that <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Th - there are sort of two choices .
speaker: C
text: Your <disfmarker> your file format can know about <disfmarker> know that you 're talking about language <pause> and speech , which is what I chose , and time ,
speaker: C
text: or your file format can just be a graph representation .
speaker: C
text: And then the application has to impose the structure on top .
speaker: C
text: So what it looked like ATLAS chose is , they chose the other way ,
speaker: C
text: which was their file format is just nodes and links ,
speaker: C
text: and you have to interpret what they mean yourself .
speaker: F
text: And why did you not choose that type of approach ?
speaker: C
text: Uh , because I knew that we were doing speech ,
speaker: C
text: and I thought it was better if you 're looking at a raw file to be <disfmarker> t for the tags to say " it 's an utterance " , as opposed to the tag to say " it 's a link " .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: F
text: But other than that , are they compatible ?
speaker: C
text: So , but <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I mean , you could sort of <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Yeah ,
speaker: C
text: they 're reasonably compatible .
speaker: F
text: I mean , you <disfmarker> you could <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: You could probably translate between them .
speaker: F
text: Yeah , that 's w
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: F
text: So ,
speaker: C
text: So ,
speaker: C
text: well , the other thing is if we choose to use ATLAS , which maybe we should just do , we should just throw this out before we invest a lot of time in it .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: F
text: I don't <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: So this is what the meeting 's about ,
speaker: F
text: just sort of how to <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: Um , cuz we need to come up with a database like this just to do our work .
speaker: F
text: And I actually don't care , as long as it 's something useful to other people , what we choose .
speaker: C
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: So maybe it 's <disfmarker> maybe oth you know ,
speaker: F
text: if <disfmarker> if you have any idea of how to choose , cuz I don't .
speaker: C
text: The only thing <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Yeah .
speaker: A
text: Do they already have tools ?
speaker: C
text: I mean , I <disfmarker> I chose this for a couple reasons .
speaker: C
text: One of them is that it 's easy to parse .
speaker: C
text: You don't need a full XML parser .
speaker: C
text: It 's very easy to just write a Perl script <pause> to parse it .
speaker: A
text: As long as uh each tag is on one line .
speaker: C
text: Exactly .
speaker: C
text: Exactly .
speaker: C
text: Which I always do .
speaker: F
text: And you can have as much information in the tag as you want ,
speaker: F
text: right ?
speaker: C
text: Well , I have it structured .
speaker: C
text: Right ?
speaker: C
text: So each type tag has only particular items that it can take .
speaker: F
text: Can you <disfmarker> But you can add to those structures if you <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Sure .
speaker: C
text: If you have more information .
speaker: C
text: So what <disfmarker> What NIST would say is that instead of doing this , you would say something like " link <nonvocalsound> start equals , um , you know , some node ID ,
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: So <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: end equals some other node ID " ,
speaker: C
text: and then " type " would be " utterance " .
speaker: A
text: Hmm .
speaker: C
text: You know , so it 's very similar .
speaker: F
text: So why would it be a <disfmarker> a waste to do it this way if it 's similar enough that we can always translate it ?
speaker: D
text: It probably wouldn't be a waste .
speaker: D
text: It would mean that at some point if we wanted to switch , we 'd just have to translate everything .
speaker: C
text: Write a translator .
speaker: C
text: But it se
speaker: F
text: But it <disfmarker> but that sounds <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Since they are developing a big <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: But that 's <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: I don't think that 's a big deal .
speaker: F
text: As long as it is <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: they 're developing a big infrastructure .
speaker: C
text: And so it seems to me that if <disfmarker> if we want to use that , we might as well go directly to what they 're doing , rather than <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: If we want to <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Do they already have something that 's <disfmarker> that would be useful for us in place ?
speaker: D
text: Yeah .
speaker: D
text: See , that 's the question .
speaker: D
text: I mean , how stable is their <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: Are they ready to go ,
speaker: C
text: The <disfmarker> I looked at it <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: or <disfmarker> ?
speaker: C
text: The last time I looked at it was a while ago ,
speaker: C
text: probably a year ago ,
speaker: D
text: Hmm .
speaker: C
text: uh , when we first started talking about this .
speaker: C
text: And at that time at least <vocalsound> it was still not very <pause> complete .
speaker: C
text: And so , specifically they didn't have any external format representation at that time .
speaker: C
text: They just had the sort of conceptual <pause> node <disfmarker> uh , annotated transcription graph ,
speaker: C
text: which I really liked .
speaker: C
text: And that 's exactly what this stuff is based on .
speaker: C
text: Since then , they 've developed their own external file format ,
speaker: C
text: which is , uh , you know , this sort of s this sort of thing .
speaker: C
text: Um , and apparently they 've also developed a lot of tools ,
speaker: C
text: but I haven't looked at them .
speaker: C
text: Maybe I should .
speaker: A
text: We should <disfmarker> we should find out .
speaker: F
text: I mean , would the tools <disfmarker> would the tools run on something like this , if you can translate them anyway ?
speaker: C
text: Um , th what would <disfmarker> would <disfmarker> would <disfmarker> what would worry me is that maybe we might miss a little detail
speaker: F
text: I mean , that <disfmarker> I guess it 's a question that <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: It 's a hassle
speaker: F
text: uh , yeah .
speaker: A
text: if <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: that would make it very difficult to translate from one to the other .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: A
text: I <disfmarker> I think if it 's conceptually close , and they already have or will have tools that everybody else will be using , I mean , <vocalsound> it would be crazy to do something s you know , separate that <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: C
text: Yeah , we might as well .
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: So I 'll <disfmarker> I 'll take a closer look at it .
speaker: F
text: Actually ,
speaker: F
text: so it 's <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: that <disfmarker> that would really be the question , is just what you would feel is in the long run the best thing .
speaker: C
text: And <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: Cuz <vocalsound> once we start , sort of , doing this I don't <disfmarker> we don't actually have enough time to probably have to rehash it out again
speaker: C
text: The <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: F
text: and <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: The other thing <disfmarker> the other way that I sort of established this was as easy translation to and from the Transcriber format .
speaker: F
text: s
speaker: F
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: Um ,
speaker: F
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: but <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I mean , I like this .
speaker: F
text: This is sort of intuitively easy to actually r read ,
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: F
text: as easy it could <disfmarker> as it could be .
speaker: F
text: But ,
speaker: F
text: I suppose that <pause> as long as they have a type here that specifies " utt " ,
speaker: F
text: um ,
speaker: C
text: It 's almost the same .
speaker: F
text: it 's <disfmarker> yeah , close enough that <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: The <disfmarker> the <disfmarker> the <disfmarker> the point is <disfmarker> with this , though , is that you can't really add any supplementary information .
speaker: C
text: Right ?
speaker: C
text: So if you suddenly decide that you want <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: You have to make a different type .
speaker: C
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: You 'd have to make a different type .
speaker: F
text: So <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Well , if you look at it
speaker: F
text: and <disfmarker> Um ,
speaker: F
text: I guess in my mind I don't know enough <disfmarker> Jane would know better , <comment> about the <pause> types of annotations
speaker: F
text: and <disfmarker> and <disfmarker> But I imagine that those are things that would <disfmarker> well , you guys mentioned this , <comment> that could span any <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: it could be in its own channel ,
speaker: F
text: it could span time boundaries of any type ,
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: it could be instantaneous ,
speaker: F
text: things like that .
speaker: F
text: Um ,
speaker: F
text: and then from the recognition side we have backtraces at the phone - level .
speaker: F
text: If <disfmarker> if it can handle that , it could handle states or whatever .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: And then at the prosody - level we have frame <disfmarker> sort of like cepstral feature files ,
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: F
text: uh , like these P - files or anything like that .
speaker: F
text: And that 's sort of the world of things that I <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: And then we have the aligned channels , of course ,
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: and <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: It seems to me you want to keep the frame - level stuff separate .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: I <disfmarker> I definitely agree
speaker: A
text: And then <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: and I wanted to find actually a f a nicer format or a <disfmarker> maybe a more compact format than what we used before .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: Just cuz you 've got <vocalsound> ten channels or whatever and two hours of a meeting .
speaker: F
text: It 's <disfmarker> it 's a lot of <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Now <disfmarker> now how would you <disfmarker> how would you represent , um , multiple speakers in this framework ?
speaker: C
text: Huge .
speaker: A
text: Were <disfmarker> You would just represent them as <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Um ,
speaker: A
text: You would have like a speaker tag or something ?
speaker: C
text: there 's a spea speaker tag up at the top which identifies them
speaker: C
text: and then each utt
speaker: C
text: the way I had it is each turn or each utterance , <comment> I don't even remember now , had a speaker ID tag attached to it .
speaker: A
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: A
text: OK .
speaker: C
text: And in this format you would have a different tag ,
speaker: C
text: which <disfmarker> which would , uh , be linked to the link .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: So <disfmarker> so somewhere else you would have another thing <pause> that would be ,
speaker: C
text: um <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Let 's see , would it be a node or a link ?
speaker: C
text: Um <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: And so <disfmarker> so this one would have , um , an ID is link <disfmarker> <comment> link seventy - four or something like that .
speaker: C
text: And then somewhere up here you would have a link that <disfmarker> that , uh , you know , was referencing L - seventy - four and had speaker Adam .
speaker: A
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: F
text: Actually , it 's the channel , I think , that <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Is i ?
speaker: C
text: You know ,
speaker: C
text: or something like that .
speaker: F
text: I mean , w
speaker: A
text: Well , channel or speaker or whatever .
speaker: F
text: yeah , channel is what the channelized output out
speaker: A
text: It doesn't <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: This isn't quite right .
speaker: C
text: I have to look at it again .
speaker: A
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: Yeah , but <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: But <disfmarker> but <disfmarker> so how in the NIST format do we express <vocalsound> a hierarchical relationship between , um , say , an utterance and the words within it ?
speaker: A
text: So how do you <pause> tell <pause> that <pause> these are the words that belong to that utterance ?
speaker: C
text: Um , you would have another structure lower down than this that would be saying they 're all belonging to this ID .
speaker: A
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: D
text: So each thing refers to the <pause> utterance that it belongs to .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: D
text: So it 's <disfmarker> it 's not hi it 's sort of bottom - up .
speaker: C
text: And then each utterance could refer to a turn ,
speaker: C
text: and each turn could refer to something higher up .
speaker: F
text: And what if you actually have <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: So right now what you have as utterance , um , the closest thing that comes out of the channelized is the stuff between the segment boundaries that the transcribers put in or that Thilo put in ,
speaker: F
text: which may or may not actually be , like , a s it 's usually not <disfmarker> um , the beginning and end of a sentence , say .
speaker: C
text: Well , that 's why I didn't call it " sentence " .
speaker: F
text: So ,
speaker: F
text: right .
speaker: F
text: Um , so it 's like a segment or something .
speaker: C
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: So ,
speaker: F
text: I mean , I assume this is possible , that if you have <disfmarker> someone annotates the punctuation or whatever when they transcribe , you can say , you know , from <disfmarker> for <disfmarker> from the c beginning of the sentence to the end of the sentence , from the annotations , this is a unit ,
speaker: F
text: even though it never actually <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: i It 's only a unit by virtue of the annotations <pause> at the word - level .
speaker: C
text: Sure .
speaker: C
text: I mean , so you would <disfmarker> you would have yet another tag .
speaker: F
text: And then that would get a tag somehow .
speaker: C
text: You 'd have another tag which says this is of type " sentence " .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: C
text: And ,
speaker: F
text: But it 's just not overtly in the <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: what <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: OK .
speaker: F
text: Um , cuz this is exactly the kind of <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: So <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I think that should be <pause> possible as long as the <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: But , uh , what I don't understand is where the <disfmarker> where in this type of file <pause> that would be expressed .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: You would have another tag somewhere .
speaker: C
text: It 's <disfmarker> well , there 're two ways of doing it .
speaker: F
text: S so it would just be floating before the sentence or floating after the sentence without a time - mark .
speaker: C
text: You could have some sort of link type <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: type equals " sentence " ,
speaker: C
text: and ID is " S - whatever " .
speaker: C
text: And then lower down you could have an utterance .
speaker: C
text: So the type is " utterance " <disfmarker> equals " utt " .
speaker: C
text: And you could either say that <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: No .
speaker: C
text: I don't know <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I take that back .
speaker: A
text: So here 's the thing .
speaker: A
text: Um <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: See , cuz it 's <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Can you <disfmarker> can you say that this is part of this ,
speaker: A
text: Hhh .
speaker: F
text: it 's <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: You would just have a r
speaker: F
text: S
speaker: C
text: or do you say this is part of this ?
speaker: C
text: I think <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: But they 're <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: You would refer up to the sentence .
speaker: A
text: Well , the thing <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: they 're actually overlapping each other , sort of .
speaker: C
text: So <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: the thing is that some something may be a part of one thing for one purpose and another thing of another purpose .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: You have to have another type then , I guess .
speaker: A
text: So f
speaker: A
text: s
speaker: A
text: Um ,
speaker: A
text: well ,
speaker: C
text: Well , I think I 'm <disfmarker> I think w I had better look at it again
speaker: A
text: s let 's <disfmarker> let 's ta so let 's <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: A
text: so <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: because I <disfmarker> I 'm <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: A
text: y So for instance @ @ <comment> sup
speaker: C
text: There 's one level <disfmarker> there 's one more level of indirection that I 'm forgetting .
speaker: A
text: Suppose you have a word sequence
speaker: A
text: and you have two different segmentations of that same word sequence .
speaker: A
text: f Say , one segmentation is in terms of , um , you know , uh , sentences .
speaker: A
text: And another segmentation is in terms of , um , <vocalsound> I don't know , <comment> prosodic phrases .
speaker: A
text: And let 's say that they don't <pause> nest .
speaker: A
text: So , you know , a prosodic phrase may cross two sentences or something .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: A
text: I don't know if that 's true or not
speaker: A
text: but <vocalsound> let 's as
speaker: F
text: Well , it 's definitely true with the segment .
speaker: A
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: That 's what I <disfmarker> exactly what I meant by the utterances versus the sentence could be sort of <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Yeah .
speaker: A
text: So , you want to be s you want to say this <disfmarker> this word is part of that sentence and this prosodic phrase .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: A
text: But the phrase is not part of the sentence
speaker: A
text: and neither is the sentence part of the phrase .
speaker: F
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: I I 'm pretty sure that you can do that ,
speaker: C
text: but I 'm forgetting the exact level of nesting .
speaker: A
text: So , you would have to have <vocalsound> two different pointers from the word up <disfmarker> one level up ,
speaker: A
text: one to the sent
speaker: C
text: So <disfmarker> so what you would end up having is a tag saying " here 's a word ,
speaker: C
text: and it starts here and it ends here " .
speaker: A
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: And then lower down you would say " here 's a prosodic boundary
speaker: C
text: and it has these words in it " .
speaker: C
text: And lower down you 'd have " here 's a sentence ,
speaker: F
text: An - Right .
speaker: A
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: and it has these words in it " .
speaker: F
text: So you would be able to go in and say , you know , " give me all the words in the bound in the prosodic phrase
speaker: F
text: and give me all the words in the <disfmarker> "
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: So I think that 's <disfmarker> that would wor
speaker: F
text: Um , OK .
speaker: C
text: Let me look at it again .
speaker: A
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: A
text: The <disfmarker> the o the other issue that you had was , how do you actually efficiently extract , um <disfmarker> find and extract information in a structure of this type ?
speaker: C
text: So .
speaker: F
text: That 's good .
speaker: A
text: So you gave some examples like <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Well ,
speaker: F
text: uh , and , I mean , you guys might <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I don't know if this is premature
speaker: F
text: because I suppose once you get the representation you can do this ,
speaker: F
text: but the kinds of things I was worried about is ,
speaker: A
text: No , that 's not clear .
speaker: F
text: uh <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: I mean , yeah , you c sure you can do it ,
speaker: F
text: Well , OK .
speaker: F
text: So i if it <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: but can you do it sort of l l you know , it <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I I mean , I can't do it ,
speaker: F
text: but I can <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: um ,
speaker: A
text: y y you gotta <disfmarker> you gotta do this <disfmarker> you <disfmarker> you 're gonna want to do this very quickly
speaker: C
text: Well <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: or else you 'll spend all your time sort of searching through very <vocalsound> complex data structures <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: You 'd need a p sort of a paradigm for how to do it .
speaker: F
text: But an example would be " find all the cases in which Adam started to talk while Andreas was talking and his pitch was rising ,
speaker: F
text: Andreas 's pitch " .
speaker: F
text: That kind of thing .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: I mean , that 's gonna be <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Is the rising pitch a <pause> feature ,
speaker: C
text: or is it gonna be in the same file ?
speaker: F
text: Well , the rising pitch will never be <pause> hand - annotated .
speaker: F
text: So the <disfmarker> all the prosodic features are going to be automatically <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: But the <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I mean , that 's gonna be hard regardless ,
speaker: F
text: So they 're gonna be in those <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: right ?
speaker: C
text: Because you 're gonna have to write a program that goes through your feature file and looks for rising pitches .
speaker: A
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: So <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: So normally what we would do is we would say " what do we wanna assign rising pitch to ? "
speaker: F
text: Are we gonna assign it to words ?
speaker: F
text: Are we gonna just assign it to sort of <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: when it 's rising we have a begin - end rise representation ?
speaker: F
text: But suppose we dump out this file
speaker: F
text: and we say , uh , for every word we just classify it as , w you know , rise or fall or neither ?
speaker: C
text: OK .
speaker: C
text: Well , in that case you would add that to this <pause> format
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: F
text: So we would basically be sort of , um , taking the format and enriching it with things that we wanna query in relation to the words that are already in the file ,
speaker: C
text: r
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: and then querying it .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: A
text: You want sort of a grep that 's <disfmarker> that works at the structural <disfmarker> on the structural representation .
speaker: C
text: You have that .
speaker: C
text: There 's a <pause> standard again in XML , specifically for searching XML documents <disfmarker> structured X - XML documents , where you can specify both the content and the structural position .
speaker: A
text: Yeah , but it 's <disfmarker> it 's not clear that that 's <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: If <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: That 's relative to the structure of the XML document ,
speaker: A
text: not to the structure of what you 're representing in the document .
speaker: C
text: You use it as a tool .
speaker: C
text: You use it as a tool ,
speaker: C
text: not an end - user .
speaker: C
text: It 's not an end - user thing .
speaker: A
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: It 's <disfmarker> it 's <disfmarker> you would use that to build your tool to do that sort of search .
speaker: A
text: Right .
speaker: A
text: Be
speaker: A
text: Because here you 're specifying a lattice .
speaker: F
text: Uh <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: So the underlying <disfmarker> that 's the underlying data structure .
speaker: F
text: But as long as the <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: And you want to be able to search in that lattice .
speaker: C
text: It 's a graph ,
speaker: C
text: but <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: That 's different from searching through the text .
speaker: F
text: But it seems like as long as the features that <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Well ,
speaker: C
text: no , no , no .
speaker: C
text: The whole point is that the text and the lattice are isomorphic .
speaker: C
text: They <pause> represent each other <pause> completely .
speaker: A
text: Um <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: So that <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I mean th
speaker: F
text: That 's true if the features from your acoustics or whatever that are not explicitly in this are at the level of these types .
speaker: A
text: Hhh .
speaker: F
text: That <disfmarker> that if you can do that <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Yeah , but that 's gonna be the trouble no matter what .
speaker: C
text: Right ?
speaker: C
text: No matter what format you choose , you 're gonna have the trou you 're gonna have the difficulty of relating the <disfmarker> the frame - level features <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: That 's right .
speaker: F
text: That 's true .
speaker: F
text: That 's why I was trying to figure out what 's the best format for this representation .
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: F
text: And it 's still gonna be <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: it 's still gonna be , uh , not direct .
speaker: A
text: Hmm .
speaker: F
text: You know , it <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: Or another example was , you know , uh , where in the language <disfmarker> where in the word sequence are people interrupting ?
speaker: F
text: So ,
speaker: F
text: I guess that one 's actually easier .
speaker: D
text: What about <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: what about , um , the idea of using a relational database to , uh , store the information from the XML ?
speaker: D
text: So you would have <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: XML basically would <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: Uh ,
speaker: D
text: you <disfmarker> you could use the XML to put the data in ,
speaker: D
text: and then when you get data out , you put it back in XML .
speaker: D
text: So use XML as sort of the <disfmarker> the transfer format ,
speaker: C
text: Transfer .
speaker: D
text: uh , but then you store the data in the database ,
speaker: D
text: which allows you to do all kinds of <pause> good search things in there .
speaker: C
text: The , uh <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: One of the things that ATLAS is doing is they 're trying to define an API which is independent of the back store ,
speaker: F
text: Huh .
speaker: C
text: so that , uh , you could define a single API and the <disfmarker> the storage could be flat XML files or a database .
speaker: D
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: C
text: My opinion on that is for the s sort of stuff that we 're doing , <comment> I suspect it 's overkill to do a full relational database , that , um , just a flat file and , uh , search tools I bet will be enough .
speaker: A
text: But <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: But that 's the advantage of ATLAS , is that if we actually take <disfmarker> decide to go that route completely and we program to their API , then if we wanted to add a database later it would be pretty easy .
speaker: D
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: D
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: F
text: It seems like the kind of thing you 'd do if <disfmarker> I don't know , if people start adding all kinds of s bells and whistles to the data .
speaker: F
text: And so that might be <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I mean , it 'd be good for us to know <disfmarker> to use a format where we know we can easily , um , input that to some database if other people are using it .
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: F
text: Something like that .
speaker: C
text: I guess I 'm just a little hesitant to try to go whole hog on sort of the <disfmarker> the whole framework that <disfmarker> that NIST is talking about , with ATLAS and a database and all that sort of stuff ,
speaker: F
text: So <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: cuz it 's a big learning curve , just to get going .
speaker: D
text: Hmm .
speaker: A
text: Hmm .
speaker: C
text: Whereas if we just do a flat file format , sure , it may not be as efficient
speaker: C
text: but everyone can program in Perl and <disfmarker> and use it .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: C
text: Right ?
speaker: C
text: So , as opposed to <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: But this is <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: I <disfmarker> I 'm still , um , <vocalsound> not convinced that you can do much at all on the text <disfmarker> on the flat file that <disfmarker> that <disfmarker> you know , the text representation .
speaker: A
text: e
speaker: A
text: Because the text representation is gonna be , uh , not reflecting the structure of <disfmarker> of your words and annotations .
speaker: A
text: It 's just <disfmarker> it 's <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Well , if it 's not representing it , then how do you recover it ?
speaker: C
text: Of course it 's representing it .
speaker: A
text: No .
speaker: A
text: You <disfmarker> you have to <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: That 's the whole point .
speaker: A
text: what you have to do is you have to basically <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Y yeah . You can use Perl to read it in and construct a internal representation that is essentially a lattice .
speaker: A
text: But , the <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: OK .
speaker: A
text: and then <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Well , that was a different point .
speaker: C
text: Right ?
speaker: C
text: So what I was saying is that <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Right .
speaker: A
text: But that 's what you 'll have to do .
speaker: C
text: For Perl <disfmarker> if you want to just do Perl .
speaker: A
text: Bec - be
speaker: C
text: If you wanted to use the structured XML query language , that 's a different thing .
speaker: C
text: And it 's a set of tools <vocalsound> that let you specify given the D - DDT <disfmarker> DTD of the document , um , what sorts of structural searches you want to do .
speaker: C
text: So you want to say that , you know , you 're looking for , um , a tag within a tag within a particular tag that has this particular text in it , um , and , uh , refers to a particular value .
speaker: C
text: And so the point isn't that an end - user , who is looking for a query like you specified , wouldn't program it in this language .
speaker: C
text: What you would do is , someone would build a tool that used that as a library .
speaker: C
text: So that they <disfmarker> so that you wouldn't have to construct the internal representations yourself .
speaker: F
text: Is a <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: See , I think the kinds of questions , at least in the next <disfmarker> to the end of this year , are <disfmarker> there may be a lot of different ones ,
speaker: F
text: but they 'll all have a similar nature .
speaker: F
text: They 'll be looking at either a word - level prosodic , uh , an <disfmarker> a value ,
speaker: F
text: like a continuous value ,
speaker: C
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: F
text: like the slope of something .
speaker: F
text: But
speaker: F
text: you know , we 'll do something where we <disfmarker> some kind of data reduction where the prosodic features are sort o uh , either at the word - level or at the segment - level ,
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: or <disfmarker> or something like that .
speaker: F
text: They 're not gonna be at the phone - level and they 're no not gonna be at the frame - level when we get done with sort of giving them simpler shapes and things .
speaker: F
text: And so the main thing is just being able <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Well , I guess , the two goals .
speaker: F
text: Um , one that Chuck mentioned is starting out with something that we don't have to start over , that we don't have to throw away if other people want to extend it for other kinds of questions ,
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: and being able to at least get enough , uh , information out on <disfmarker> where we condition the location of features on information that 's in the kind of file that you <pause> put up there .
speaker: F
text: And that would <disfmarker> that would do it ,
speaker: F
text: I mean , for me .
speaker: C
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: I think that there are quick and dirty solutions ,
speaker: C
text: and then there are long - term , big - infrastructure solutions .
speaker: C
text: And so <vocalsound> we want to try to pick something that lets us do a little bit of both .
speaker: F
text: In the between ,
speaker: F
text: right .
speaker: F
text: And especially that the representation doesn't have to be thrown away ,
speaker: C
text: Um <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: even if your tools change .
speaker: C
text: And so it seems to me that <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I mean , I have to look at it again to see whether it can really do what we want ,
speaker: C
text: but if we use the ATLAS external file representation , um , it seems like it 's rich enough that you could do quick tools just as I said in Perl ,
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: and then later on if we choose to go up the learning curve , we can use the whole ATLAS inter infrastructure ,
speaker: F
text: I mean , that sounds good to me .
speaker: C
text: which has all that built in .
speaker: F
text: I <disfmarker> I don't <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: So
speaker: F
text: if <disfmarker> if you would l look at that and let us know what you think .
speaker: C
text: Sure .
speaker: F
text: I mean , I think we 're sort of guinea pigs ,
speaker: F
text: cuz I <disfmarker> I want to get the prosody work done
speaker: F
text: but I don't want to waste time , you know , getting the <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Oh , maybe <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Yeah ?
speaker: A
text: um <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Well , I wouldn't wait for the formats , because anything you pick we 'll be able to translate to another form .
speaker: A
text: Well <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Ma
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: A
text: well , maybe you should actually look at it yourself too to get a sense of what it is you 'll <disfmarker> you 'll be dealing with ,
speaker: A
text: because , um , you know , Adam might have one opinion but you might have another ,
speaker: B
text: Yeah .
speaker: A
text: so
speaker: F
text: Yeah , definitely .
speaker: A
text: I think the more eyes look at this the better .
speaker: F
text: Especially if there 's , e um <disfmarker> you know , if someone can help with at least the <disfmarker> the setup of the right <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Oh , hi .
speaker: C
text: Hi , Jane .
speaker: A
text: Mmm .
speaker: F
text: the right representation ,
speaker: F
text: then , i you know , I hope it won't <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: We don't actually need the whole full - blown thing to be ready ,
speaker: C
text: Can you <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Oh , well .
speaker: F
text: so .
speaker: F
text: Um ,
speaker: F
text: so maybe if you guys can look at it and sort of see what ,
speaker: C
text: Sure .
speaker: B
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: um <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I think we 're <disfmarker> we 're <disfmarker> <vocalsound> we 're actually just <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: We 're about done .
speaker: F
text: yeah ,
speaker: F
text: wrapping up ,
speaker: B
text: Hmm .
speaker: F
text: but ,
speaker: F
text: um <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Yeah ,
speaker: F
text: sorry , it 's a uh short meeting ,
speaker: F
text: but , um <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Well , I don't know .
speaker: F
text: Is there anything else ,
speaker: F
text: like <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I mean that helps me a lot ,
speaker: C
text: Well , I think the other thing we might want to look at is alternatives to P - file .
speaker: F
text: but <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I mean , th the reason I like P - file is I 'm already familiar with it ,
speaker: C
text: we have expertise here ,
speaker: C
text: and so if we pick something else , there 's the learning - curve problem .
speaker: C
text: But , I mean , it is just something we developed at ICSI .
speaker: C
text: And so <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Is there an <disfmarker> is there an IP - API ?
speaker: C
text: Yeah .
speaker: A
text: OK .
speaker: C
text: There 's an API for it .
speaker: C
text: And , uh ,
speaker: A
text: There used to be a problem that they get too large ,
speaker: C
text: a bunch of libraries , P - file utilities .
speaker: A
text: and so <pause> basically the <disfmarker> uh the filesystem wouldn't <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Well , that 's gonna be a problem no matter what .
speaker: C
text: You have the two - gigabyte limit on the filesystem size .
speaker: C
text: And we definitely hit that with Broadcast News .
speaker: A
text: Maybe you could extend the API to , uh , support , uh , like splitting up , you know , conceptually one file into smaller files on disk
speaker: A
text: so that you can essentially , you know , have arbitrarily long f
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: C
text: Most of the tools can handle that .
speaker: C
text: So that
speaker: A
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: we didn't do it at the API - level .
speaker: C
text: We did it at the t tool - level .
speaker: C
text: That <disfmarker> that <disfmarker> most <disfmarker> many of them can s you can specify several P - files
speaker: C
text: and they 'll just be done sequentially .
speaker: A
text: OK .
speaker: C
text: So .
speaker: F
text: So , I guess ,
speaker: F
text: yeah ,
speaker: F
text: if <disfmarker> if you and Don can <disfmarker> if you can show him the P - file stuff and see .
speaker: C
text: Sure .
speaker: F
text: So this would be like for the F - zero <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I mean , if you do " man P - file " or " apropos P - file " , you 'll see a lot .
speaker: B
text: True .
speaker: B
text: I 've used the P - file , I think .
speaker: B
text: I 've looked at it at least , briefly , I think when we were doing s something .
speaker: A
text: What does the P stand for anyway ?
speaker: C
text: I have no idea .
speaker: B
text: Oh , in there .
speaker: C
text: I didn't de I didn't develop it .
speaker: C
text: You know , it was <disfmarker> I think it was Dave Johnson .
speaker: C
text: So it 's all part of the Quicknet library .
speaker: C
text: It has all the utilities for it .
speaker: A
text: No , P - files were around way before Quicknet .
speaker: C
text: Oh , were they ?
speaker: A
text: P - files were <disfmarker> were around when <disfmarker> w with , um , <vocalsound> RAP .
speaker: D
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: A
text: Right ?
speaker: F
text: It 's like the history of ICSI .
speaker: A
text: You worked with P - files .
speaker: F
text: Like <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: D
text: No .
speaker: A
text: I worked with P - files .
speaker: F
text: Yeah ?
speaker: D
text: I don't remember what the " P " is , though .
speaker: A
text: No .
speaker: C
text: But there are ni they 're <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: The <pause> Quicknet library has a bunch of things in it to handle P - files ,
speaker: A
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: so it works pretty well .
speaker: F
text: And that isn't really , I guess , as important as the <disfmarker> the main <disfmarker> I don't know what you call it , the <disfmarker> the main sort of word - level <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Neither do I .
speaker: D
text: Probably stands for " Phil " .
speaker: D
text: Phil Kohn .
speaker: C
text: It 's a Phil file ?
speaker: D
text: Yeah .
speaker: D
text: That 's my guess .
speaker: F
text: Huh .
speaker: F
text: OK .
speaker: F
text: Well , that 's really useful .
speaker: F
text: I mean , this is exactly the kind of thing that I wanted to settle .
speaker: F
text: Um ,
speaker: F
text: so <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Yeah , I 've been meaning to look at the ATLAS stuff again anyway .
speaker: F
text: Great .
speaker: C
text: So , just keep <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: I guess it 's also sort of a political deci
speaker: F
text: I mean , if <disfmarker> if you feel like that 's a community that would be good to tie into anyway , then it 's <disfmarker> sounds like it 's worth doing .
speaker: C
text: Yeah , I think it <disfmarker> it w
speaker: A
text: j I think there 's <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: And , w uh , as I said , I <disfmarker> what I did with this stuff <disfmarker> I based it on theirs .
speaker: C
text: It 's just they hadn't actually come up with an external format yet .
speaker: C
text: So now that they have come up with a format , it doesn't <disfmarker> it seems pretty reasonable to use it .
speaker: A
text: Mmm .
speaker: C
text: But let me look at it again .
speaker: F
text: OK ,
speaker: F
text: great .
speaker: C
text: As I said , that <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Cuz we actually can start <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: There 's one level <disfmarker> there 's one more level of indirection
speaker: C
text: and I 'm just blanking on exactly how it works .
speaker: C
text: I gotta look at it again .
speaker: F
text: I mean , we can start with , um , I guess , this input from Dave 's ,
speaker: F
text: which you had printed out , the channelized input .
speaker: F
text: Cuz he has all of the channels ,
speaker: F
text: you know , with the channels in the tag and stuff like that .
speaker: C
text: Yeah , I 've seen it .
speaker: F
text: So that would be i directly ,
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: F
text: um <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Easy <disfmarker> easy to map .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: And so then it would just be a matter of getting <disfmarker> making sure to handle the annotations that are , you know , not at the word - level and , um , t to import the
speaker: B
text: Where are those annotations coming from ?
speaker: F
text: Well , right now , I g Jane would <disfmarker> <vocalsound> would <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: E
text: Are you talking about the overlap a annotations ?
speaker: F
text: Yeah ,
speaker: F
text: any kind of annotation <pause> that , like , isn't already there .
speaker: F
text: Uh , you know , anything you can envision .
speaker: E
text: Yeah .
speaker: E
text: So what I was imagining was <disfmarker> um , so Dave says we can have unlimited numbers of green ribbons .
speaker: E
text: And so put , uh , a <disfmarker> a green ribbon on for an overlap code .
speaker: E
text: And since we w we <disfmarker>
speaker: E
text: I <disfmarker> I think it 's important to remain flexible regarding the time bins for now .
speaker: E
text: And so it 's nice to have <disfmarker>
speaker: E
text: However , you know , you want to have it , uh , time time uh , located in the discourse .
speaker: E
text: So ,
speaker: E
text: um ,
speaker: E
text: if we <disfmarker> if we tie the overlap code to the first word in the overlap , then you 'll have a time - marking .
speaker: E
text: It won't <disfmarker> it 'll be independent of the time bins ,
speaker: E
text: however these e evolve , shrink , or whatever ,
speaker: E
text: increase ,
speaker: E
text: or <disfmarker>
speaker: E
text: Also , you could have different time bins for different purposes .
speaker: E
text: And having it tied to the first word in an overlap segment is unique , uh , you know , anchored , clear .
speaker: E
text: And it would just end up on a separate ribbon .
speaker: E
text: So the overlap coding is gonna be easy with respect to that .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: E
text: You look puzzled .
speaker: D
text: I <disfmarker> I just <disfmarker> I don't quite understand what these things are .
speaker: E
text: OK .
speaker: E
text: What , the codes themselves ?
speaker: D
text: Uh .
speaker: D
text: Well , th overlap codes .
speaker: E
text: Or the <disfmarker> ?
speaker: D
text: I 'm not sure what that @ @ <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Well , I mean , is that <disfmarker>
speaker: E
text: Well , we don't have to go into the codes .
speaker: D
text: It probably doesn't matter .
speaker: E
text: We don't have to go into the codes .
speaker: D
text: No , I d
speaker: C
text: I mean , it doesn't .
speaker: C
text: I mean , that <disfmarker> not for the topic of this meeting .
speaker: E
text: But let me just <disfmarker>
speaker: E
text: No .
speaker: E
text: W the idea is just to have a separate green ribbon ,
speaker: E
text: you know ,
speaker: E
text: and <disfmarker> and <disfmarker> and let 's say that this is a time bin .
speaker: E
text: There 's a word here .
speaker: E
text: This is the first word of an overlapping segment of any length ,
speaker: E
text: overlapping with any other , uh , word <disfmarker> uh , i segment of any length .
speaker: E
text: And , um ,
speaker: E
text: then you can indicate that this here was perhaps a ch a backchannel ,
speaker: E
text: or you can say that it was , um , a usurping of the turn ,
speaker: E
text: or you can <disfmarker> you know , any <disfmarker> any number of categories .
speaker: E
text: But the fact is , you have it time - tagged in a way that 's independent of the , uh , sp particular time bin that the word ends up in .
speaker: E
text: If it 's a large unit or a small unit , or
speaker: A
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: E
text: we sh change the boundaries of the units ,
speaker: F
text: Right .
speaker: E
text: it 's still unique and <disfmarker> and , uh , fits with the format ,
speaker: E
text: flexible , all that .
speaker: A
text: Um ,
speaker: A
text: it would be nice <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: um ,
speaker: A
text: eh , gr this is sort of r regarding <disfmarker> uh , uh it 's related but not directly germane to the topic of discussion ,
speaker: A
text: but , when it comes to annotations , um , you often find yourself in the situation where you have <pause> different annotations <pause> of the same , say , word sequence .
speaker: E
text: Yeah .
speaker: A
text: OK ?
speaker: E
text: Yeah .
speaker: A
text: And sometimes the word sequences even differ slightly because they were edited s at one place but not the other .
speaker: A
text: So , once this data gets out there , some people might start annotating this for , I don't know , dialogue acts or , um , you know , topics or what the heck .
speaker: A
text: You know ,
speaker: A
text: there 's a zillion things that people might annotate this for .
speaker: A
text: And the only thing that is really sort of common among all the versi the various versions of this data is the word sequence ,
speaker: E
text: Yep .
speaker: A
text: or approximately .
speaker: F
text: Or the time .
speaker: A
text: Or the times .
speaker: A
text: But , see , if you 'd annotate dialogue acts , you don't necessarily want to <disfmarker> or topics <disfmarker> you don't really want to be dealing with time - marks .
speaker: F
text: I guess .
speaker: A
text: You 'd <disfmarker> it 's much more efficient for them to just see the word sequence , right ?
speaker: F
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: A
text: I mean , most people aren't as sophisticated as <disfmarker> as we are here with , you know , uh , time alignments and stuff .
speaker: A
text: So <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: So the <disfmarker> the <disfmarker> the point is <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Should <disfmarker> should we mention some names on the people who are n ?
speaker: A
text: Right .
speaker: A
text: So ,
speaker: A
text: um ,
speaker: A
text: the p my point is that <pause> you 're gonna end up with , uh , word sequences that are differently annotated .
speaker: A
text: And <pause> you want some tool , uh , that is able to sort of merge these different annotations back into a single , uh , version .
speaker: A
text: OK ?
speaker: A
text: Um , and we had this problem very massively , uh , at SRI when we worked , uh , a while back on , <vocalsound> uh <disfmarker> well , on dialogue acts as well as , uh , you know ,
speaker: A
text: um , what was it ?
speaker: A
text: uh ,
speaker: F
text: Well , all the Switchboard in it .
speaker: A
text: utterance types .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: A
text: There 's , uh , automatic , uh , punctuation and stuff like that .
speaker: A
text: Because we had one set of <pause> annotations that were based on , uh , one version of the transcripts with a particular segmentation ,
speaker: A
text: and then we had another version that was based on , uh , a different s slightly edited version of the transcripts with a different segmentation .
speaker: A
text: So , <vocalsound> we had these two different versions which were <disfmarker> you know , you could tell they were from the same source but they weren't identical .
speaker: A
text: So it was extremely hard <vocalsound> to reliably merge these two back together to correlate the information from the different annotations .
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: C
text: I <disfmarker> I don't see any way that file formats are gonna help us with that .
speaker: A
text: No .
speaker: C
text: It 's <disfmarker> it 's all a question of semantic .
speaker: A
text: No .
speaker: A
text: But once you have a file format , I can imagine writing <disfmarker> not personally , but someone writing a tool that is essentially an alignment tool , um , that mediates between various versions ,
speaker: F
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: C
text: Yeah .
speaker: A
text: and <disfmarker> uh , sort of like th uh , you know , you have this thing in UNIX where you have , uh , diff .
speaker: C
text: Diff .
speaker: F
text: W - diff or diff .
speaker: A
text: There 's the , uh , diff that actually tries to reconcile different <disfmarker> two diffs f <comment> based on the same original .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: E
text: Is it S - diff ?
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: E
text: Mmm .
speaker: A
text: Something like that ,
speaker: A
text: um , but operating on these lattices that are really what 's behind this <disfmarker> uh , this annotation format .
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: A
text: So <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: You could definitely do that with the <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: There 's actually a diff library you can use <pause> to do things like that that <disfmarker> so you have different formats .
speaker: A
text: So somewhere in the API you would like to have like a merge or some <disfmarker> some function that merges two <disfmarker> two versions .
speaker: C
text: Yeah , I think it 's gonna be very hard .
speaker: C
text: Any sort of structured anything when you try to merge is really , really hard
speaker: A
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: because you ha i
speaker: C
text: The hard part isn't the file format .
speaker: C
text: The hard part is specifying what you mean by " merge " .
speaker: A
text: Is <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Exactly .
speaker: F
text: But the one thing that would work here actually for i that is more reliable than the utterances is the <disfmarker> the speaker ons and offs .
speaker: C
text: And that 's very difficult .
speaker: F
text: So if you have a good ,
speaker: F
text: um <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: But this is exactly what I mean , is that <disfmarker> that the problem i
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: You just have to know wha what to tie it to .
speaker: C
text: Yeah ,
speaker: C
text: exactly .
speaker: C
text: The problem is saying " what are the semantics ,
speaker: F
text: And <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: what do you mean by " merge " ? "
speaker: F
text: Right , right .
speaker: A
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: So .
speaker: A
text: So <disfmarker> so just to let you know what we <disfmarker> where we kluged it by , uh , doing <disfmarker> uh , by doing <disfmarker> Hhh .
speaker: A
text: Both were based on words ,
speaker: A
text: so , bo we have two versions of the same words intersp you know , sprinkled with <disfmarker> with different tags for annotations .
speaker: C
text: And then you did diff .
speaker: A
text: And we did diff .
speaker: C
text: Yeah ,
speaker: A
text: Exactly !
speaker: C
text: that 's just what I thought .
speaker: A
text: And that 's how <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: That 's just wh how I would have done it .
speaker: A
text: Yeah .
speaker: A
text: But , you know , it had lots of errors
speaker: A
text: and things would end up in the wrong order , and so forth .
speaker: A
text: Uh ,
speaker: A
text: so ,
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: A
text: um , if you had a more <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Uh ,
speaker: A
text: it <disfmarker> it was a kluge
speaker: A
text: because it was basically reducing everything to <disfmarker> uh , to <disfmarker> uh , uh , to textual alignment .
speaker: C
text: A textual <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: Um ,
speaker: A
text: so <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: But ,
speaker: F
text: d isn't that something where whoever <disfmarker> if <vocalsound> <disfmarker> if the people who are making changes , say in the transcripts , cuz this all happened when the transcripts were different <disfmarker> ye um , if they tie it to something , like if they tied it to the acoustic segment <disfmarker> if they <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: You know what I mean ?
speaker: F
text: Then <disfmarker> Or if they tied it to an acoustic segment and we had the time - marks , that would help .
speaker: F
text: But the problem is exactly as Adam said , that you get , you know , y you don't have that information or it 's lost in the merge somehow ,
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: F
text: so <disfmarker>
speaker: E
text: Well , can I ask one question ?
speaker: E
text: It <disfmarker> it seems to me that , um , we will have o an official version of the corpus , which will be only one <disfmarker> one version in terms of the words <disfmarker> where the words are concerned .
speaker: E
text: We 'd still have the <disfmarker> the merging issue maybe if coding were done independently of the <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: And you 're gonna get that
speaker: E
text: But <disfmarker> but <disfmarker>
speaker: A
text: because if the data gets out , people will do all kinds of things to it .
speaker: A
text: And , uh , s you know , several years from now you might want to look into , um , the prosody of referring expressions .
speaker: A
text: And someone at the university of who knows where has annotated the referring expressions .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: A
text: So you want to get that annotation and bring it back in line with your data .
speaker: C
text: But unfortunately they 've also hand - edited it .
speaker: A
text: OK ?
speaker: E
text: OK , then <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: But they 've also <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Exactly .
speaker: F
text: And so that 's exactly what we should <disfmarker> somehow when you distribute the data , say that <disfmarker> you know , that <disfmarker> have some way of knowing how to merge it back in and asking people to try to do that .
speaker: A
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: Yep .
speaker: A
text: Right .
speaker: E
text: Well , then the <disfmarker>
speaker: D
text: What 's <disfmarker> what 's wrong with <pause> doing times ?
speaker: E
text: I agree .
speaker: D
text: I <disfmarker>
speaker: E
text: That was what I was wondering .
speaker: F
text: Uh , yeah , time is the <disfmarker>
speaker: E
text: Time is unique .
speaker: C
text: Well ,
speaker: E
text: You were saying that you didn't think we should <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Time is passing !
speaker: A
text: Time <disfmarker> time <disfmarker> times are ephemeral .
speaker: E
text: Andreas was saying <disfmarker>
speaker: E
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: what if they haven't notated with them , times ?
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: He <disfmarker> he 's a language modeling person , though .
speaker: A
text: Um <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: So <disfmarker> so imagine <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I think his <disfmarker> his example is a good one .
speaker: C
text: Imagine that this person who developed the corpus of the referring expressions didn't include time .
speaker: A
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: A
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: He included references to words .
speaker: E
text: Ach !
speaker: E
text: Well , then <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: He said that at this word is when <disfmarker> when it happened .
speaker: A
text: Yeah .
speaker: A
text: Or she .
speaker: E
text: But then couldn't you just indirectly figure out the time <pause> tied to the word ?
speaker: C
text: Or she .
speaker: F
text: But still they <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Exactly .
speaker: C
text: Sure .
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: But what if <disfmarker> what if they change the words ?
speaker: E
text: Not <disfmarker>
speaker: E
text: Well ,
speaker: E
text: but you 'd have some anchoring point .
speaker: E
text: He couldn't have changed all the words .
speaker: D
text: But can they change the words without changing the time of the word ?
speaker: C
text: Sure .
speaker: C
text: But they could have changed it a little .
speaker: C
text: The <disfmarker> the point is , that <disfmarker> that they may have annotated it off a word transcript that isn't the same as our word transcript ,
speaker: C
text: so how do you merge it back in ?
speaker: C
text: I understand what you 're saying .
speaker: A
text: Mmm .
speaker: A
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: C
text: And I <disfmarker> I guess the answer is , um , it 's gonna be different every time .
speaker: C
text: It 's j it 's just gonna be <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Yeah .
speaker: E
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: You only know the boundaries of the <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: I it 's exactly what I said before ,
speaker: C
text: which is that " what do you mean by " merge " ? "
speaker: C
text: So in this case where you have the words and you don't have the times , well , what do you mean by " merge " ?
speaker: F
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: If you tell me what you mean , I can write a program to do it .
speaker: F
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: You can merge at the level of the representation that the other person preserved and that 's it .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: C
text: And that 's about all you can do .
speaker: F
text: And beyond that , all you know is <disfmarker> is relative ordering
speaker: F
text: and sometimes even that is wrong .
speaker: C
text: So <disfmarker> so in <disfmarker> so in this one you would have to do a best match between the word sequences ,
speaker: F
text: So .
speaker: A
text: Mm - hmm .
speaker: C
text: extract the times f from the best match of theirs to yours ,
speaker: C
text: and use that .
speaker: F
text: And then infer that their time - marks are somewhere in between .
speaker: C
text: Right .
speaker: F
text: Yeah , exactly .
speaker: E
text: But it could be that they just <disfmarker> uh , I mean , it could be that they chunked <disfmarker> they <disfmarker> they lost certain utterances and all that stuff ,
speaker: C
text: Right ,
speaker: C
text: exactly .
speaker: C
text: So it could get very , very ugly .
speaker: E
text: or <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: Definitely .
speaker: F
text: Definitely .
speaker: E
text: Yeah .
speaker: F
text: Alright .
speaker: F
text: Well , I guess , w I <disfmarker> I didn't want to keep people too long
speaker: E
text: That 's interesting .
speaker: F
text: and Adam wanted t people <disfmarker>
speaker: F
text: I 'll read the digits .
speaker: F
text: If anyone else offers to , that 'd be great .
speaker: F
text: And
speaker: A
text: Ah , well .
speaker: F
text: if not , I guess <disfmarker>
speaker: C
text: Yeah .
speaker: C
text: More digits , the better .
speaker: A
text: For th for the <disfmarker> <nonvocalsound> for the benefit of science we 'll read the digits .
speaker: C
text: OK ,
speaker: F
text: Thanks <disfmarker> thanks a lot .
speaker: C
text: this is
speaker: F
text: It 's really helpful .
speaker: F
text: I mean , Adam and Don <nonvocalsound> will sort of meet
speaker: F
text: and I think that 's great .
speaker: F
text: Very useful .
speaker: F
text: Go next .
speaker: D
text: Scratch that .
speaker: E
text: O three
speaker: C
text: Oh , right .

Meeting summary:
text: Two main options were discussed as to the organisation of the collected data.
text: On the one hand, a bespoke XML structure that connects transcriptions and annotations (down to the word-level) to a common timeline.
text: Its advantages are that it is easier to read, parse, map onto the Transcriber format and to expand with extra features.
text: Phone-level analysis can be included in the same structure, or in a separate, linked file.
text: The respective frame-level representation can be handled by P-files, a technology developed at ICSI, which also comes with a library of tools.
text: Separation of levels of analysis makes files more compact and manageable.
text: XML standards offer libraries that can be used for the development of search tools.
text: On the other hand, the ATLAS (NIST) technology offers a very similar, but more generic organisational scheme based on nodes and links.
text: These are labeled with domain specific types, like "utterance" or "speaker".
text: This option offer well-developed infrastructure and flexibility as to the type of data storage (flat XML files or relational database).
text: In either case, it is important for the chosen format to allow for fast searches, flexible updates and, if possible, be reusable in future work.
text: In order to confirm the suitability of the data format provided by the ATLAS project, its current state of development will be investigated.
text: More specifically, the issues that have to be ascertained are, firstly, whether the external file representation offers a format that would be appropriate for speech data, and, secondly, how the linking between the different annotations (eg, between word-level representations and prosodic-feature structures) can be achieved.
text: Regardless of the actual format, however, there was consensus that keeping levels of analysis (words, phones, frames, etc) on separate, inter-linked files can make their management easier.
text: Choosing a project-specific format for the representation of the data might not be optimal for future work.
text: On the other hand, it is not yet clear whether a more standardised, but generic technology, like that of the ATLAS project, can accommodate all the requirements of speech analysis.
text: Regardless of the particular format, including all annotations (sentences, words, phones, frames, etc) in one file could result in unmanageable file sizes.
text: Searching, updating or simply parsing a file for a simple task can become an unwieldy process.
text: Even P-files, which are only for frame-level annotation, may be too verbose for the amount of data resulting from hour-long recordings.
text: The actual mapping of word-level transcriptions to frame-level representations is expected to be problematic anyway.
text: Likewise, problems will arise if, in the future, slightly different transcripts of the same data are annotated in formats that do not include time-marks.
text: Trying to merge such annotations later will not be easy, because of the combination of transcription discrepancies with the loss of the underlying connection offered by the time-marks.
text: An XML scheme to build representations of the data is already available.
text: It incorporates information regarding utterances, sentences, speakers, words, etc.
text: All these features are linked together via time-marks that slot into a single, common timeline.
text: This format also allows for linking to different levels of representation of the same data.
text: For the frame-level representation, P-files is a readily available technology, developed at ICSI.
text: Besides the appropriate format, P-files come with a library of tools and the respective documentation.