Automatic Transcription of Football Commentaries in the MUMIS Project

Abstract

This paper describes experiments carried out to automatically transcribe football commentaries in Dutch, English and German for multimedia indexing. Our results show that the high levels of stadium noise in the material create a task that is extremely difficult for conventional ASR. The baseline WERs vary from 83% to 94% for the three languages investigated. Employing state-of-the-art noise robustness techniques leads to relative reductions of 9-10% WER. Application specific words such as players' names are recognized correctly in about 50% of cases. Although this result is substantially better than the overall result, it is inadequate. Much better results can be obtained if the football commentaries are recorded separately from the stadium noise. This would make the automatic transcriptions more useful for multimedia indexing.