Linefeed Insertion into Japanese Spoken Monologue for Captioning

Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th IJCNLP of the AFNLP, pages 531–539, Suntec, Singapore, 2-7 August 2009. c⃝2009 ACL and AFNLP Linefeed Insertion into Japanese Spoken Monologue for Captioning Tomohiro Ohno Graduate School of International Development, Nagoya University, Japan ohno@nagoya-u.jp Masaki Murata Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Japan murata@el.itc.nagoya-u.ac.jp Shigeki Matsubara Information Technology Center, Nagoya University, Japan matubara@nagoya-u.jp Abstract To support the real-time understanding of spoken monologue such as lectures and commentaries, the development of a cap- tioning system is required. In monologues, since a sentence tends to be long, each sentence is often displayed in multi lines on one screen, it is necessary to insert linefeeds into a text so that the text be- comes easy to read. This paper proposes a technique for inserting linefeeds into a Japanese spoken monologue text as an el- emental technique to generate the read- able captions. Our method appropriately inserts linefeeds into a sentence by ma- chine learning, based on the information such as dependencies, clause boundaries, pauses and line length. An experiment us- ing Japanese speech data has shown the ef- fectiveness of our technique. 1 Introduction Real-time captioning is a technique for support- ing the speech understanding of deaf persons, el- derly persons, or foreigners by displaying tran- scribed texts of monologue speech such as lec- tures. In recent years, there exist a lot of re- searches about automatic captioning, and the tech- niques of automatic speech recognition (ASR) aimed for captioning have been developed (Bou- lianne et al., 2006; Holter et al., 2000; Imai et al., 2006; Munteanu et al., 2007; Saraclar et al., 2002; Xue et al., 2006). However, in order to gen- erate captions which is easy to read, it is important not only to recognize speech with high recognition rate but also to properly display the transcribed text on a screen (Hoogenboom et al., 2008). Es- pecially, in spoken monologue, since a sentence tends to be long, each sentence is often displayed as a multi-line text on a screen. Therefore, proper linefeed insertion for the displayed text is desired so that the text becomes easy to read. Until now, there existed few researches about how to display text on a screen in automatic cap- tioning. As the research about linefeed insertion, Monma et al. proposed a method based on pat- terns of a sequence of morphemes (Monma et al., 2003). However, the target of the research is closed-captions of Japanese TV shows, in which less than or equal to 2 lines text is displayed on a screen and the text all switches to other text at a time. In the work, the highest priority concept on captioning is that one screen should be filled with as much text as possible. Therefore, a se- mantic boundary in a sentence is hardly taken into account in linefeed insertion, and the readability of the caption is hardly improved. This paper proposes a technique for inserting linefeeds into transcribed texts of Japanese …

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