Transcription and Summarization of Voicemail Speech

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a system to transcribe and summarize voicemail messages. The results of the research we present are two-fold. First, a hybrid connectionist approach to the Voicemail transcription task shows that competitive performance can be achieved using a context-independent system with fewer parameters than those based on mixtures of Gaussian likelihoods. Second, an effective and robust combination of statistical with prior knowledge sources for term weighting is used to extract information from the decoder’s output in order to deliver summaries to the message recipients via a GSM Short Message Service (SMS) gateway.