IBM's AI performs state-of-the-art broadcast news captioning

Two years ago, researchers at IBM claimed state-of-the-art transcription performance with a machine learning system trained on two public speech recognition data sets, which was more impressive than it might seem. The AI system had to contend not only with distortions in the training corpora's audio snippets, but with a range of speaking styles, overlapping speech, interruptions, restarts, and exchanges among participants. In pursuit of an even more capable system, researchers at the Armonk, New York-based company recently devised an architecture detailed in a paper ("English Broadcast News Speech Recognition by Humans and Machines") that will be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing in Brighton this week. They say that in preliminary experiments it achieved industry-leading results on broadcast news captioning tasks. The system came with its own set of challenges, like audio signals with lots of background noise and presenters speaking on a wide variety of news topics.