Grad H: Right , which uh So I 've been working on using the THISL tools to do information retrieval on meeting data and the THISL tools are there 're two sets , there 's a back - end and a front - end , so the front - end is the user interface and the back - end is the indexing tool and the querying tool . And so I 've written some tools to convert everything into the right for file formats . And the command line version of the indexing and the querying is now working . So at least on the one meeting that I had the transcript for uh conveniently you can now do information retrieval on it , do type in a a string and get back a list of start - end times for the meeting ,
PhD F: What what kind of uh what does that look like ? The string that you type in .
Grad H: uh of hits .
PhD F: What are you are you are they keywords , or are they ?
Grad H: Keywords .
PhD F: OK . I see .
Grad H: Right ? And so and then it munges it to pass it to the THISL IR which uses an SGML - like format for everything .
PhD F: I see .
Professor B: And then does it play something back or that 's something you 're having to program ?
Grad H: Um , right now , I have a tool that will do that on a command line using our standard tools ,
Professor B: Yeah .
Grad H: but my intention is to do a prettier user interface based either So so that 's the other thing I wanted to discuss , is well what should we do for the user interface ? We have two tools that have already been written . Um the SoftSound guys did a web - based one ,
Professor B: Mm - hmm .
Grad H: um , which I haven't used , haven't looked at . Dan says it 's pretty good
Professor B: Mm - hmm .
Grad H: but it does mean you need to be running a web server .
Professor B: Mm - hmm .
Grad H: And so it it 's pretty big and complex . Uh and it would be difficult to port to Windows because it means porting the web server to Windows .
Professor B: Mm - hmm .
Grad H: Uh the other option is Dan did the Tcl - TK THISL GUI front - end for Broadcast News
Professor B: Yeah .
Grad H: which I think looks great . I think that 's a nice demo . Um and that would be much easier to port to Windows . And so I think that 's the way we should go .
Postdoc A: I Can I ask a question ? So um as it stands within the the Channeltrans interface , it 's possible to do a find and a play .
Grad H: Mm - hmm .
Postdoc A: You can find a searched string and play . So e Are you So you 're adding like um , I don't know , uh are they fuzzy matches or are they uh ?
Grad H: It 's a sort of standard , text - retrieval - based So it 's uh term frequency , inverse document frequency scoring .
Postdoc A: OK .
Grad H: Um and then there are all sorts of metrics for spacing how far apart they have to be and things like that . So it it 's
Postdoc A: It 's a lot more sophisticated than the uh the basically Windows - based Grad H: i it 's like doing a Google query or anyth anything else like that .
Postdoc A: OK .
Grad H: So i it uses So it pr produces an index ahead of time so you don't you 're not doing a linear search through all the documents . Cuz you can imagine if with if we have the sixty hours ' worth you do wouldn't wanna do a search .
Postdoc A: Hm - mmm . Good .
Grad H: Um you have to do preindexing and so that these tools do all that . And so the work to get the front - end to work would be porting it well uh to get it to work on the UNIX systems , our side is just rewriting them and modifying them to work for meetings .
Professor B: Mm - hmm .
Grad H: So that it understands that they 're different speakers and that it 's one big audio file instead of a bunch of little ones and just sorta things like that .
Professor B: Mm - hmm .
PhD G: Mm - hmm .
PhD F: So what does the user see as the result of the query ?
Grad H: On which tool ?
PhD F: THISL .
Grad H: The THISL GUI tool which is the one that Dan wrote , Tcl - TK
PhD F: Yeah .
Grad H: um you type in a query and then you get back a list of hits and you can type on them and listen to them . Click on them rather {comment} with a mouse .
PhD F: Ah .
Professor B: Mmm
PhD F: So if you typed in " small heads " or something you could
Grad H: Right , you 'd get PhD F: get back a uh uh {comment} something that would let you click and listen to some audio where that phrase had occurred
Grad H: something You you 'd get to listen to " beep " .
PhD F: or some
Professor B: That was a really good look . It 's too bad that that couldn't come into the Grad H: You couldn't get a video .
PhD G: Guess who I practice on ?
Postdoc A: At some point we 're gonna have to say what that private joke is , that keeps coming up .
Professor B: Yeah . And then again , maybe not . So , uh Yeah , that soun that sounds reasonable . Yeah , it loo it my my recollection of it is it 's it 's a pretty reasonable uh demo sort of format .
Grad H: Right .
PhD F: Yeah that sounds good .
Grad H: And so I think there 'd be minimal effort to get it to work , minimally
PhD F: That sounds really neat .
Grad H: and then we 'd wanna add things like query by speaker and by meeting and all that sort of stuff . Um Dave Gelbart expressed some interest in working on that so I 'll work with him on it . And it it 's looking pretty good , you know , the fact that I got the query system working . So if we wanna just do a video - based one I think that 'll be easy .
Professor B: Mm - hmm .
Grad H: If we wanna get it to Windows it 's gonna be a little more work because the THISL IR , the information retrieval tool 's um , I had difficulty just compiling them on Solaris .
Professor B: Mm - hmm .
Grad H: So getting them to compile on Windows might be challenging .
Professor B: Mm - hmm .
PhD F: But you were saying that that the uh that there 's that set of tools , uh , Cygnus tools , that Grad H: So . It certainly helps .
PhD F: Uh - huh .
Grad H: Um , I mean without those I wouldn't even attempt it .
Professor B: Mm - hmm .
PhD F: Yeah .
Grad H: But what those they what those do is provide sort of a BSD compatibility layer ,
Professor B: Mm - hmm .
Grad H: so that the normal UNIX function calls all work .
Professor B: Mm - hmm .
PhD F: And you have to have all the o
Grad H: Um , But the problem is that that the THISL tools didn't use anything like Autoconf and so you have the normal porting problems of different header files and th some things are defined and some things aren't and uh different compiler work - arounds and so on . So the fact that um it took me a day to get it c to compile under Solaris means it 's probably gonna take me s significantly more than that to get it to compile under Windows .
Professor B: How about having it run under free BSD ?
PhD E: Well what you need Grad H: Free BSD would probably be easier .
PhD E: All you need to do is say to Dan " gee it would be nice if this worked under Autoconf " and it 'll be done in a day .
Grad H: That 's true .
PhD D: Uh PhD E: Right ?
Grad H: Actually you know I should check because he did port it to SPRACHcore
PhD E: Right .
Grad H: so he might have done that already .
PhD E: I I I wouldn't be surprised .
Professor B: So Grad H: I 'll check at that Professor B: But it would what would serve would serve both purposes , is if you contact him and ask him if he 's already done it .
PhD E: What I PhD F: How does it play ?
Grad H: Yeah , right .
Professor B: If he has then you learn , if he hasn't then he 'll do it .
Grad H: Right .
Postdoc A: Wow .
PhD F: I hope he never listens to these meetings .
Grad H: That 's right . So , and I 've been corresponding with Dan and also with uh uh , SoftSound guy , uh Postdoc A: It 's amazing .
Professor B: Yeah .
Grad H: Blanking on his name .
Professor B: Tony Robinson ?
PhD F: Tony Robinson ?
Grad H: Do I mean Tony ? I guess I do .
Professor B: Yeah .
PhD E: James Christie .
Grad H: Or S or Steve Renals .
Professor B: Steve Renal - Steve Renals .
Grad H: Which one do I mean ?
PhD E: Steve Renals is not SoftSound , is he ?
Professor B: No .
Grad H: My brain is not working ,
Professor B: OK .
Grad H: I don't remember who I 've been corresponding with .
PhD E: Steve wro i it 's Ste - Steve Renals wrote THISL IR .
Grad H: Then it 's Steve Renals .
Professor B: Oh , OK .
PhD E: OK .
Grad H: So uh just getting documentation and uh and f and formats ,
Professor B: Yeah .
Grad H: so that 's all going pretty well ,
Professor B: Assuming we 're PhD E: Right .
PhD F: What about issues of playing sound files @ @ between the two platforms ?
Grad H: I think we 'll be OK with that . Um we have Well , that 's a good point too .
PhD E: Here 's a here 's a crazy idea actually .
Grad H: I don't know .
PhD E: Why don't you try and merge Transcriber and THISL IR ? They 're both Tcl interfaces .
Grad H: Well this is one of the reasons This is the one of the reasons that I 'm gonna have uh Dave Gelbart Gelbart Having him volunteer to work on it is a really good thing because he 's worked on the Transcriber stuff
PhD E: Right .
Grad H: and he 's more familiar with Tcl - TK than I am .
PhD E: And then you get they then you get the Windows media playing for free .
Grad H: Well that 's Snack , not not Transcriber .
PhD E: Right . But the point is that the Transcriber uses Snack and then you can but you can use a a lot of the same functionality and it 's Grad H: Yeah , yeah , I mean , I I think THISL THISL GUI probably uses Snack . And so my intention was just to base it on that .
PhD E: Yeah . Well my thought was is that it would be nice it would be nice to have the running transcripts um eh you know , from speaker to speaker .
Grad H: And if it doesn't PhD E: Right ? Do you have you have , you know , a speaker mark here and a speaker mark here ?
Grad H: Right , we 'll have to figure out a user interface for that , so .
PhD E: Right . Well that eh my thought was if you had like Multitrans or whatever do it . Or whatever .
Grad H: Yeah . It might be fairly difficult to get that to work in {comment} the little short segments we 'd be talking about and having the search tools and so on . We we can look into it ,
PhD E: Yeah .
Grad H: but Professor B: The thing I was asking about with , um , free BSD is that it might be easier to get PowerPoint shows running in free BSD than to get this other package running in Grad H: Yeah , I mean we have to I have to sit down and try it before I make too many judgments ,
Professor B: Yeah .
Grad H: so uh Um My experience with the Gnu compatibility library is really it 's just as hard and just as easy to port to any system . Right ? The Windows system isn't any harder because it it looks like a BSD system .
Professor B: Mm - hmm .
Grad H: It 's just , you know , just like all of them , the " include " files are a little different and the function calls are a little different .
Professor B: Right .
Grad H: So I it might be a little easier but it 's not gonna be a lot easier .
Professor B: OK . So there was that demo , which was one of the main ones , then we talked about um some other stuff which would basically be um showing off the the Transcriber interface itself and as you say , maybe we could even merge those in some sense , but but um , uh and part of that was showing off what the speech - non uh nonspeech {comment} stuff that Thilo has done s looks like .
PhD D: Yeah .
Postdoc A: Can I ask one more thing about THISL ? So with the IR stuff then you end up with a somewhat prioritized um ?
Grad H: Mm - hmm . Mm - hmm ,
Postdoc A: Excellent .
Grad H: ranked .
Postdoc A: Excellent . Yeah .
PhD G: So another idea I w t had just now actually for the demo was whether it might be of interest to sh to show some of the prosody uh work that Don 's been doing .
Professor B: Mm - hmm .
PhD G: Um actually show some of the features and then show for instance a task like finding sentence boundaries or finding turn boundaries . Um , you know , you can show that graphically , sort of what the features are doing . It , you know , it doesn't work great but it 's definitely giving us something .
Professor B: Well I think at at the very least we 're gonna want something illustrative with that
PhD G: I don't know if that would be of interest or not .
Professor B: cuz I 'm gonna want to talk about it and so i if there 's something that shows it graphically it 's much better than me just having a bullet point
PhD G: Yeah .
Professor B: pointing at something I don't know much about ,
PhD G: I mean , you 're looking at this now Professor B: so .
PhD G: Are you looking at Waves or Matlab ?
Grad C: Um yeah I 'm starting to and um Yeah we can probably find some examples of different type of prosodic events going on .
PhD G: Yeah def
Professor B: S so when we here were having this demo meeting , what we 're sort of coming up with is that we wanna have all these pieces together , to first order , by the end of the month
PhD G: I
Professor B: and then that 'll give us a week or so .
Grad C: Ooo . The end of PhD G: Oh , the end of this month or next month ? Oh , you mean like today ?
Grad H: This month .
Professor B: Ju
PhD G: Oh .
Professor B: June . June . June .
PhD G: Next month .
Grad H: Oh sorry , next month .
Grad C: Yeah .
PhD G: Sorry .
Grad H: Today isn't June first ,
PhD F: There 's another one .
Grad H: is it .
Professor B: Uh that 'll that 'll give us that 'll give us a week or so to uh to port things over to my laptop and make sure that works ,
PhD E: Exactly .
PhD G: Sorry .
Professor B: yeah .
PhD G: I think , I mean eh where Grad C: Yeah , I mean I 'll be here .
PhD G: Yeah if d if Don can sort of talk to whoever 's Professor B: Yeah .
PhD G: cuz we 're doing this anyway as part of our you know , the research , visualizing what these features are doing
Professor B: Yeah .
PhD G: and so either it might not be integrated but it it could potentially be in it .
Professor B: Yeah . Well , this is to an audience of researchers
PhD G: Could find some .
Professor B: so I mean , you know , to let s the goal is to let them know what it is we 're doing .
PhD G: I mean it 's different .
Professor B: So that 's PhD G: I don't think anyone has done this on meeting data so it might be neat , you know .
Professor B: Yeah . Good . Done with that . XML tools ?