Lessons Learned in Transcribing 5000 h of Air Traffic Control Communications for Robust Automatic Speech Understanding

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216305%3A26230%2F23%3APU149719" target="_blank" >RIV/00216305:26230/23:PU149719 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4310/10/10/898" target="_blank" >https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4310/10/10/898</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/aerospace10100898" target="_blank" >10.3390/aerospace10100898</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Lessons Learned in Transcribing 5000 h of Air Traffic Control Communications for Robust Automatic Speech Understanding

Original language description

Voice communication between air traffic controllers (ATCos) and pilots is critical for ensuring safe and efficient air traffic control (ATC). The handling of these voice communications requires high levels of awareness from ATCos and can be tedious and error-prone. Recent attempts aim at integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into ATC communications in order to lessen ATCos's workload. However, the development of data-driven AI systems for understanding of spoken ATC communications demands large-scale annotated datasets, which are currently lacking in the field. This paper explores the lessons learned from the ATCO2 project, which aimed to develop an unique platform to collect, preprocess, and transcribe large amounts of ATC audio data from airspace in real time. This paper reviews (i) robust automatic speech recognition (ASR), (ii) natural language processing, (iii) English language identification, and (iv) contextual ASR biasing with surveillance data. The pipeline developed during the ATCO2 project, along with the open-sourcing of its data, encourages research in the ATC field, while the full corpus can be purchased through ELDA. ATCO2 corpora is suitable for developing ASR systems when little or near to no ATC audio transcribed data are available. For instance, the proposed ASR system trained with ATCO2 reaches as low as 17.9% WER on public ATC datasets which is 6.6% absolute WER better than with "out-of-domain" but gold transcriptions. Finally, the release of 5000 h of ASR transcribed speech-covering more than 10 airports worldwide-is a step forward towards more robust automatic speech understanding systems for ATC communications.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

—

Continuities

R - Projekt Ramcoveho programu EK

Publication year

2023

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Aerospace

ISSN

2226-4310

e-ISSN

—

Volume of the periodical

2023

Issue of the periodical within the volume

10

Country of publishing house

CH - SWITZERLAND

Number of pages

33

Pages from-to

1-33

UT code for WoS article

001093774900001

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85175267376