PhD I: Well , yeah . So this is just partly to inform everybody , um , and and of course to get , um , input .
Grad F: Oops .
PhD I: Um , so , {nonvocalsound} uh , we had a discussion Don and Liz and I had discussion last week about how to proceed with , uh , you know , with Don 's work ,
PhD E: Ch
PhD I: and  and and , uh , one of the obvious things that occur to us was that we 're since we now have Thilo 's segmenter and it works , you know , amazingly well , um , we should actually basically re - evaluate the recognition , um , results using you know , without cheating on the segmentations .
PhD E: So PhD I: And , that should be fairly PhD E: And how do we find the transcripts for those so that ? Yeah . The references for for those segments ?
PhD I: Oh , OK . So , there 's actually PhD E: It 's not that PhD I: Why do you ask ?
Grad F: I could PhD I: No , actually , um , NIST has , um m a fairly sophisticated scoring program that you can give a , um  a time ,
Grad F: Hand ones .
PhD G: Well PhD E: OK .
PhD I: uh You know , you basically just give two time - marked sequences of words , and it computes the um the , {comment} uh {comment} you know , the the th
PhD B: It does all the work for you .
PhD I: it does all the work for you .
PhD B: Yeah .
PhD E: OK .
PhD I: So , it we just and we use that actually in Hub - five to do the scoring . Um . So what we 've been using so far was sort of a simplified version of the scoring . And we can we can handle the the the type of problem we have here .
PhD E: So , basically you give some time constraints for for the references and for for the hypothesis ,
PhD I: So , we ha Yeah . Right .
PhD E: and Yeah , OK .
PhD G: Yeah .
PhD I: Right .
PhD G: Maybe the start of your speech and the end of it ,
PhD I: So do
PhD E: OK .
PhD G: or stuff like that .
PhD I: Right . It does time - constrained word - alignment .
PhD E: OK .
PhD I: So . So that should be possible . I mean that shouldn't be a problem . Uh , so that was the one thing , and the other was that , um What was the other problem ? Oh ! That Thilo wanted to use the recognizer alignments to train up his , um , speech detector .
PhD E: Yeah .
PhD I: Um , so that we could use , uh you know there wouldn't be so much hand labelling needed to , uh to generate training data for for the speech detector .
PhD E: Yeah . I 'm just in progress of of doing that . So .
PhD I: And I think you 're in the process of doing that .
PhD E: Yeah .
PhD I: So , you can {comment} you can PhD B: It 'll give you a lot more data , too . Won't it ?
PhD E: Yeah . So , it 's basically s I think , eight meetings or something which which I 'm using , and , it 's  before it was twenty minutes of one meeting .
PhD I: Mm - hmm .
PhD E: So should {comment} be a little bit better .
PhD I: Right .
PhD B: Great .
PhD I: That won't be perfect the alignments aren't perfect ,
PhD E: Yeah . But PhD I: but , um , it 's probably still better to have all this extra data , than PhD G: Yeah .
PhD E: Yeah . Yep .
PhD I: Yeah .
PhD E: We 'll see that .
PhD I: Yeah .
Professor D: OK .
PhD G: Actually , I had a question about that . If you find that you can lower the false alarms that you get where there 's no speech , that would be useful for us to know . So , um PhD E: There were the false alarms .
PhD G: Yeah . So , r right now you get f fal you know , false false , uh , speech regions when it 's just like , um , breath or something like that ,
PhD E: OK . Yeah . Yep .
PhD G: and I 'd be interested to know the wha if you retrain um ,
PhD E: Yeah .
PhD G: do those actually go down or not ? Because of PhD E: Yeah . I 'll can make an can , like , make a c comparison of of the old system to the to the new one , and then PhD G: Yeah , just to see if by doing nothing in the modeling of just having that training data wh what happens .
PhD E: Yeah . Yeah . Yep .
Professor D: Um another one that we had on Adam 's agenda that definitely involved you was s something about SmartKom ?
Grad F: Right . So , Rob Porzel eh , Porzel ? and the , uh Porzel and the , uh , SmartKom group are collecting some dialogues .
PhD I: Porzel . Porzel .
Grad F: Basically they have one person sitting in here , looking at a picture , and a wizard sitting in another room somewhere . And , uh , they 're doing a travel task . And , uh , it involves starting I believe starting with a It 's it 's always the wizard , but it starts where the wizard is pretending to be a computer and it goes through a , uh , speech generation system .
PhD E: Yeah . Actually , it 's changed to a synthesis for for the first part now .
Grad F: Synthesis system .
PhD E: Yeah .
Grad F: Um , and then , it goes to a real wizard and they 're evaluating that . And they wanted to use this equipment , and so the w question came up , is well , here 's some more data . Should this be part of the corpus or not ? And my attitude was yes , because there might be people who are using this corpus for acoustics , as opposed to just for language . Um , or also for dialogue of various sorts . Um , so it 's not a meeting . Right ? Because it 's two people and they 're not face to face .
Professor D: Wait a minute . So , I just wanted to understand it , cuz I I 'm uh , hadn't quite followed this process .
PhD E: Yeah .
Professor D: Um . So , it 's wizard in the sen usual sense that the person who is asking the questions doesn't know that it 's , uh , a machi not a machine ?
PhD I: Right .
Grad F: At the beginning .
PhD I: Actually actually , w w the the We do this I dunno who came up with it , but I think it 's a really clever idea . We simulate a computer breakdown halfway through the session , and so then after that , the person 's told that they 're now talking to a , uh to a human .
Professor D: Yeah .
PhD E: It 's a human operator .
Professor D: Yeah .
PhD E: Yeah .
Grad F: But of course they don't know that it 's the same person both times .
PhD I: So , we we collect we collect both human - computer and human - human data , essentially , in the same session .
Professor D: You might wanna try collecting it the other way around sometime , saying that th the computer isn't up yet
Postdoc A: Hmm .
Professor D: and then so then you can separate it out whether it 's the beginning or end kind of effects .
PhD I: That 's an idea .
Professor D: But , yeah .
Grad F: Yep .
PhD I: Yeah .
Postdoc A: That 's a good idea .
Grad F: " I have to go now . You can talk to the computer . "
PhD B: It 's a lot more believable , too ,
Grad F: " No ! "
PhD B: if you tell them that they 're the computer part is running on a Windows machine . And the whole breakdown thing kinda makes sense .
PhD I: O Just just reboot it .
Grad F: Abort abort , retry , fail ?
PhD G: So did they actually save the far - field data ?
PhD E: Yes .
Grad F: Well , this was this was the question .
PhD G: Cuz at first they weren't they weren't sa
PhD I: Yeah .
Grad F: So so they were saying they were not going to ,
PhD E: Yeah .
PhD G: OK .
Grad F: and I said , " well that 's silly , if if we 're gonna try to do it for a corpus , there might be people who are interested in acoustics . "
PhD G: Yeah .
PhD I: Wow .
PhD E: No .
PhD G: Or PhD E: projector {comment} We were not saying we are not doing it .
PhD G: Yeah .
Professor D: S
PhD E: We wer we just wanted to do PhD I: No , the the question is do we save one or two far - field channels or all of them ?
PhD G: Right .
PhD E: Yeah . Yeah .
Grad F: I I see no reason not to do all of them .
Professor D: Um Grad F: That that if we have someone who is doing acoustic studies , uh , it 's nice to have the same for every recording .
PhD G: Nnn . Yeah .
PhD I: Hmm .
Professor D: So , what is the purpose of this recording ?
PhD I: Mm - hmm .
Professor D: This is to get acoustic and language model training data for SmartKom. OK .
PhD I: It 's to be traini to b training data and development data for the SmartKom system .
PhD E: The English system ? Yeah .
PhD I: Yeah . Right . Right .
PhD B: Where does this ?
Professor D :
PhD G: Maybe we can have him vary the microphones , too ,
Professor D: Well ,
PhD E: B
PhD G: or they 're different s speakers .
Grad F: Right . So so so for their usage , they don't need anything .
Professor D: so why not ?
PhD E: Yeah .
Grad F: Right ?
PhD E: But but I 'm not sure about the legal aspect of of that . Is is there some contract with SmartKom or something about the data ?
PhD I: Yeah .
PhD E: What they or , is is that our data which we are collecting here ,
Professor D: We 've never signed anything that said that we couldn't use anything that we did .
PhD E: or ? OK . OK .
PhD I: We weren't supposed to collect any data .
PhD E: So . OK .
Professor D: Yeah .
PhD E: So . Yeah , th th that was the question .
PhD I: This was all PhD E: If if ? Yeah .
PhD I: Yeah .
Professor D: No that 's not a problem .
PhD E: Basically .
Professor D: I L look , it seems to me that if we 're doing it anyway and we 're doing it for these these purposes that we have , and we have these distant mikes , we definitely should re should save it all as long as we 've got disk space ,
PhD I: Mm - hmm .
Professor D: and disk is pretty cheap .
PhD I: OK .
Professor D: So should we save it ?
Grad F: And then Professor D: Now th Yeah . So we save it because it 's it it 's potentially useful . And now , what do we do with it is is a s separate question .
Grad F: Right .
Professor D: I mean , anybody who 's training something up could choose to put it eh , to u include this or not .
PhD I: Right .
Professor D: I I would not say it was part of the meetings corpus . It isn't . But it 's some other data we have , and if somebody doing experiment wants to train up including that then they can . Right ?
PhD I: Mm - hmm .
Grad F: So it 's It it I guess it the begs the question of what is the meeting corpus . So if , at UW they start recording two - person hallway conversations is that part of the meeting corpus ?
Professor D: I think it 's I I think I th think the idea of two or more people conversing with one another is key .
Grad F: Well , this has two or more people conversing with each other .
Professor D: Nnn , well
PhD E: Yeah .
Postdoc A: Well this Grad F: They 're just not face to face .
PhD G: What if we just give it a a name like we give these meetings a name ?
Professor D: No , it doesn't . Right ? It has Grad F: I mean , that was my intention .
PhD G: And then later on some people will consider it a meeting and some people won't ,
Postdoc A: Well this Professor D: Yeah .
Grad F: That was my intention . So so s so part of the reason that I wanted to bring this up is , do we wanna handle it as a special case or do we wanna fold it in ,
PhD G: and Just give it a title .
Postdoc A: Oh .
Professor D: I think it is a s
Grad F: we give everyone who 's involved as their own user ID , give it session I Ds , let all the tools that handle Meeting Recorder handle it , or do we wanna special case it ? And if we were gonna special case it , who 's gonna do that ?
PhD E: So .
PhD I: Well , it it makes sense to handle it with the same infrastructure , since we don't want to duplicate things unnecessarily .
PhD E: It it it Postdoc A: I think PhD I: But as far as distributing it , we shouldn't label it as part of this meeting corpus .
Professor D: Yeah .
PhD I: We should let it be its own corp
Postdoc A: Well it 's it well , because Grad F: I don't see why not . It 's just a different topic .
Postdoc A: I ha I have an extra point , which is the naturalness issue . Because we have , like , meetings that have a reason . That 's one of the reasons that we were talking about this . And and those and this sounds like it 's more of an experimental setup .
Professor D: Yeah .
Postdoc A: It 's got a different purpose .
Professor D: It 's scenario - based , it 's it 's human - computer interface  it 's really pretty different .
Postdoc A: Yeah .
Professor D: But I I I have no problem with somebody folding it in for some experiment they 're gonna do , but I don't think i it it doesn't match anything that we 've described about meetings .
Grad F: Mm - hmm .
Professor D: Whereas everything that we talked about them doing at at UW and so forth really does . They 're actually talking Grad F: OK . So w so what does that mean for how we are gonna organize things ?
Postdoc A: Hmm .
PhD E: Yeah .
Professor D: You can you can Again , as as I think Andreas was saying , if you wanna use the same tools and the same conventions , there 's no problem with that . It 's just that it 's , you know , different directory , it 's called something different , it 's you know . It is different . You can't just fold it in as if it 's I mean , digits are different , too . Right ?
Grad F: Yeah , but those are folded in ,
PhD I: It might also be potentially confusing .
Grad F: and it 's just you just mark the transcripts differently . So so one option is you fold it in ,
PhD I: Right .
Grad F: and just simply in the file you mark somewhere that this is this type of interaction , rather than another type of interaction .
PhD I: Yeah , I th
Professor D: Well , I don I wouldn't call reading digits " meetings " . Right ? I mean , we we we were doing Grad F: Well , but but , I put it under the same directory tree .
Professor D: Well Grad F: You know , it 's in " user doctor speech data MR " .
PhD G: Can we just have a directory called , like , " other stuff " ?
Grad F: Other .
PhD G: And Well or , I dunno .
Professor D: I mean , I don't care what directory tree you have it under .
PhD G: And  and just , um , store it there .
Professor D: Right ? I mean that 's just a Grad F: OK . My preference is to have a single procedure so that I don't have to think too much about things .
PhD I: Yes .
PhD G: I mean Professor D: Yeah .
Grad F: And , just have a marking .
Professor D: O - You you can use whatever procedure you want that 's p convenient for you .
Grad F: If we do it any other way that means that we need a separate procedure , and someone has to do that .
Professor D: All I 'm saying is that there 's no way that we 're gonna tell people that reading digits is meetings . And similarly we 're not gonna tell them that someone talking to a computer to get travel information is meetings .
Grad F: Right .
Professor D: Those aren't meetings . But if it makes it easier for you to pu fold them in the same procedures and have them under the same directory tree , knock yourself out .
PhD B: There 's a couple other questions that I have too ,
Professor D: You know ?
PhD B: and and one of them is , what about , uh , consent issues ? And the other one is , what about transcription ? Are ?
PhD E: Transcription is done in Munich .
PhD B: OK . So we don't have to worry about transcribing it ?
Professor D: Alright .
PhD E: Yeah .
Grad F: So , w we will hafta worry about format .
PhD I: That 's a that 's another argument to keep it separate , because it 's gonna follow the SmartKom transcription conventions and not the ICSI meeting transcription conventions .
PhD E: Yeah .
Grad F: Oh , OK .
Professor D: Ah . Good point .
Grad F: OK . Well , I didn't realize that . That 's that 's a Professor D: Good point . But I 'm sure no one would have a problem with our folding it in for some acoustic modeling or or some things . Um . Do we h do we have , uh , um , American - born folk , uh , reading German German , uh , pla uh , place names and so forth ? Is that ?
PhD E: Yeah .
PhD I: Exactly .
Professor D: Yeah , great .
PhD E: Yeah .
Grad F: Yep .