How many batteries do you go through?

Thank you.

Alright.

Sure.

Good. Yeah. OK so, let's get started. Nancy said she's coming and that means she will be. Um. My suggestion is that Robert and Johno sort of give us a report on last week's adventures uh to start. So everybody knows there were these guys f uh from Heidelber - uh, uh, actually from uh DFKI uh, part of the German SmartKom project, who were here for the week and, I think got a lot done.

Yeah, I think so too. Um. The we got to the point where we can now speak into the SmartKom system, and it'll go all the way through and then say something like " Roman numeral one, am Smarticus. " It actually says, " Roemisch einz, am Smarticus, "

OK.

which means it's just using a German sythesis module for English sentences.

OK.

So uh,

It doesn't know " I ".

OK.

Um, the uh

Oh, Am Spartacus. "

" I am Sm - I am Smarticus " is what it's saying.

Right.

Verstehe. OK.

I gue

The uh sythesis is just a question of um, hopefully it's just a question of exchanging a couple of files, once we have them. And, um, it's not going to be a problem because we decided to stick to the so - called concept to speech approach. So I'm I'm I'm going backwards now, so " synthesis " is where you sort of make this uh, make these sounds, and " concept to speech " is feeding into this synthesis module giving it what needs to be said, and the whole syntactic structure so it can pronounce things better, presumably. Then, just with text to speech.

Mm - hmm.

And, uh, Johno learned how to write XML tags. Uh, and did write the tree adjoining grammar for some some sentences. No, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, for a couple.

So. Bu - Uh, i The way the uh, the dialogue manager works is it dumps out what it wants to know, or what it wants to tell the person, to a er in XML and there's a conversion system for different uh, to go from XML to something else. And th so, the knowledge base for the system, that generates the syntasti syntactic structures for the ge generation is uh, in a LISP - like the knowledge base is in a LISP - like form. And then the thing that actually builds these syntactic structures is something based on Prolog. So, you have a basically, a goal and it, you know, says " OK, well I'm gonna try to do the Greet - the - person goal,

Mm - hmm.

so it just starts uh, it binds some variables and it just decides to, you know, do some subscold. Basically, it just means " build the tree. "

OK.

And then it passes the tree onto, uh, the ge the generation module.

But I think that the point is that out of the twelve possible utterances that the German system can do, we've already written the the syntax trees for three or four.

We yeah. So, the syntax trees are very simple. It's like most of the sentences in one tree,

Mm - hmm.

and instead of, you know, breaking down to, like, small units and building back up, they basically took the sentences, and basically cut them in half, or you know, into thirds or something like that, and made trees out of those. And so uh, uh Tilman wrote a little tool that you could take LISP notation and generate an XML, uh, tree. Uh, S what do ca structure from the from the LISP. And so basically you just say, you know, " noun goes to ", you know, Er, nah, I don't re I've never been good at those. So there's like the VP goes to N and those things in LISP, and it will generate for you.

OK. N, N, V yeah, OK. Alright.

And because we're sticking to that structure, the synthesis module doesn't need to be changed. So all that f fancy stuff, and the Texas speech version of it, which is actually the simpler version, is gonna be done in October which is much too late for us. So. This way we we worked around that. The, uh the system, um I can show you the system. I actually want, at least, maybe, you should be able to start it on your own. If you wanna play around with it, in th in the future. Right now it's brittle and you need to ch start it up and then make ts twenty changes on on on on seventeen modules before they actually can stomach it, anything. And send in a a a couple of side queries on some dummy center set - up program so that it actually works because it's designed for this seevit thing, where you have the gestural recognition running with this s Siemens virtual touch screen, which we don't have here.

Mm - hmm.

And so we're doing it via mouse, but the whole system was designed to work with this thing and it was It was a lot of engineering stuff. No science in there whatsoever, but it's working now, and um, that's the good news. So everything else actually did prove to be language independent except for the parsing and the generation.

Why I had I did need to chan generate different trees than the German ones, mainly because you know like uh, the gerund in in German is automatically taken care of with just a regular verb,

You have to switch it on.

Mm - hmm.

so I'd uh have to add " am walking, "

OK.

or I'd have to add a little stem for the " am ", when I build the built the tree.

OK. Yeah, I noticed that um, that some of the examples they had, had you know, non - English word orders and so on, you know. And then all that good stuff. So.

Alright.

Yeah.

Like.

So it might be worth, Keith, you looking at this,

Yeah.

um

I I still don't I still don't really understand e like.

Well Tilman s

I mean we sort of say, um You know, I I still don't exactly understand sort of the information flow uh in in this thing, or what the modules are and so on. So, you know, like just that such - and - such module uh um decides that it wants to achieve the goal of greeting the user, and then magically it sort of s

Yeah.

I mean, how does it know which syntactic structure to pull out, and all that?

I thi Yeah. So. I think it's not worth going over in the group,

R uh Sure.

but sort of when you get free and you have the time uh either Robert or Johno or I can walk you through it.

Yeah, soon. OK.

And you can ask all the questions about how this all fits together.

That's fine.

It's eee  messy but once you understand it you understand it. It's it's There's nothing really complicated about it.

OK.

No.

And I remember one thing that that came up in the talk last Wednesday. Um, was this, I I think he talked about the idea of like, um He was talking about these lexicalized uh, uh, tree adjoining grammars where you sort of for each word you, um.

OK, you know how to do it?

For each lexical item, the lexical entry says what all the uh trees are that it can appear in. And of course, that's not v That's the opposite of constructional. That's, you know, that's that's HPSG or whatever.

Right.

You know?

Right. Now, we're we're not committed for our research to do any of those things.

Yeah. Mm - hmm.

So uh we are committed for our funding.

Right.

OK? to uh.

Make our stuff fit to that.

Yeah, to n no, to just get the dem get the demos they need.

Uh - huh.

OK? So between us all we have t to get th the demos they need. If it turns out we can also give them lots more than that by, you know, tapping into other things we do, that's great.

You should probably move the microphone closer to your face.

Mm - hmm.

But i it turns out not to be in an any of the contracts

There's like a little The twisty thing, you can move it with.

OK.

and, s deliberately. So, the reason I'd like you to understand uh what's going on in this demo system is not because it's important to the research. It's just for closure. So that if we come up with a question of " could we fit this deeper stuff in there? " or something. You know what the hell we we're talking about fitting in.

Right. OK.

So it's just, uh in the sam same actually with the rest of us we just need to really understand what's there. Is there anything we can make use of? Uh, is there anything we can give back, beyond th the sort of minimum requirements? But none of that has a short time fuse.

OK.

So th the demo the demo requirements for this Fall are sort of taken care of as of later this week or something. And then So, it's probably fifteen months or something until there's another serious demo requirement.

Oh OK.

That doesn't mean we don't think about it for fifteen months,

Right.

but it means we can not think about it for six months.

Right, yeah.

So. The plan for this summer uh, really is to step back from the applied project,

Right.

keep the d keep the context open, but actually go after the basic issues.

Hmm. Oh OK.

And, so The idea is there's this uh, other subgroup that's worrying about formalizing the nota getting a notation. But sort of in parallel with that, uh, the hope is tha in particularly you will work on constructions in English Ge - and German for this domain,

Mm - hmm.

but y not worry about parsing them or fitting them into SmartKom or any of the other anything lik any other constraints for the time being.

Yeah. OK. Got it.

It's hard enough to get it semantically and syntactically right and then and get the constructions in their form and stuff.

Yeah.

And, I don I don't want you f feeling that you have to somehow meet all these other constraints.

Right, OK.

Um. And similarly with the parsing, uh we're gonna worry about parsing uh, the general case you know, construction parser for general constructions. And, if we need a cut - down version for something, or whatever, we'll worry about that later.

OK.

So I'd like to, for the summer turn into science mode.

OK.

And I assume that's also, uh, your plan as well.

So I mean, the the point is that like the meetings um so far that I've been at have been sort of been geared towards this demo,

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

and then that's going to go away pretty soon.

But but we we're swit

OK.

Right.

And then we'll sort of shift gears a Fairly substantially,

Yeah.

It's.

Yeah.

huh?

Yeah.

It's got. What I what I think is is a good idea that I can can show to anyone who's interested, we can even make a sort of an internal demo, and I I show you what I do,

Mm - hmm.

I speak into it and you hear it talk,

OK.

and I can sort of walk f through the information. So, this is like in half hour or forty - five minutes. Just fun.

OK.

And so you when somebody on the streets com comes up to you and asks you what is SmartKom so you can, sort of, give a sensible answer.

Right. OK.

So, c sh we could set that up as actually an institute wide thing? Just give a talk in the big room, and and so peo people know what's going on? when you're ready?

Absolutely.

Yeah I mean, that's the kind of thing That's the level at which you know we can just li invite everybody and say " this is a project that we've been working on and here's a demo version of it " and stuff like that.

Yeah.

OK. Well d we we do wanna have all the bugs out b where you have to sort of pipe in extra XML messages from left and right before you're.

Uh - huh.

Indeed.

Yeah. OK. Makes sense.

But any so that e e It's clear, then, I think. Actually, roughly starting uh let's say, nex next meeting, cuz this meeting we have one other thing to tie up besides the trip report.

Yeah. OK.

But uh starting next meeting I think we want to flip into this mode where Uh. I mean there are a lot of issues, what's the ontology look like,

Mm - hmm.

you know what do the constructions look like, what's the execution engine look like, mmm lots of things.

Mm - hmm.

But, more focused on uh an idealized version than just getting the demo out. Now before we do that, let's get back in Oh! But, it's still, I think, useful for you to understand the demo version enough, so that you can can see what what it is that that uh it might eventually get retro - fitted into or something.

Yeah. OK, right.

And Johno's already done that, uh, looked at the dem uh the looked at the SmartKom stuff.

Wa uh To some de uh what what part of th the SmartKom stuff?

Well, the parser, and that stuff.

Oh yeah yeah.

OK. Anyway. So, the trip the report on these the last we we sort of interrupted you guys telling us about what happened last week.

Yeah. It's alright.

Um. Well it was just amazing to to see uh how how instable the whole thing is,

Maybe you're done, then.

and if you just take the And I g I got the feeling that we are the only ones right now who have a running system. I don't know what the guys in Kaiserslautern have running because e the version that is, the full version that's on the server d does not work. And you need to do a lot of stuff to make it work. And so it's And even Tilman and Ralf sort of said " yeah there never was a really working version that uh did it without th all the shortcuts that they built in for the uh October @ @ version ". So we're actually maybe ahead of the System Gruppe by now, the system the integration group. And it was, uh It was fun to some extent, but the uh the outcome that is sort of of scientific interest is that I think both Ralf and Tilman um, I know that they enjoyed it here, and they r they they liked, uh, a lot of the stuff they saw here, what what we have been thinking about, and they're more than willing to to um, cooperate, by all means. And um, part of my responsibility is uh to use our internal " group - ware " server at EML, make that open to all of us and them, so that whatever we discuss in terms of parsing and and generating and constructions w we we sort of uh put it in there and they put what they do in there and maybe we can even um, get some overlap, get some synergy out of that. And um, the, uh If I find someone at in EML that is interested in that, um I I may even think that we could look take constructions and and generate from them because the tree adjoining grammars that that Tilman is using is as you said nothing but a mathematical formalism. And you can just do anything with it, whether it's syntactic trees, H P S G - like stuff, or whether it's construction. So if you ever get to the generation side of constructing things and there might be something of interest there, but in the moment we're of course definitely focused on the understanding, um, pipeline.

Anyth - any other  uh repo visit reports sort of stories? uh we so we now know I think, what the landscape is like.

Mm - hmm.

And so we just push on and and uh, do what we need to do. And one of the things we need to do is the um, and this I think is relatively tight tightly constrained, is to finish up this belief - net stuff. So. Uh. And I was going to switch to start talking about that unless there're m other more general questions. OK so here's where we are on the belief - net stuff as far as I understand it. Um. Going back I guess two weeks ago uh Robert had laid out this belief - net, missing only the connections. Right? That is  So, he'd put all th all the dots down, and we went through this, and, I think, more or less convinced ourselves that at least the vast majority of the nodes that we needed for the demo level we were thinking of, were in there. Yeah  we may run across one or two more. But of course the connections weren't. So, uh Bhaskara and I went off and looked at some technical questions about were certain operations sort of legitimate belief - net computations and was there some known problem with them or had someone already uh, solved you know how to do this and stuff. And so Bhaskara tracked that down. The answer seems to be uh, " no, no one has done it, but yes it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do if that's what you set out to do ". And, so the current state of things is that, again, starting now, um we'd like to actually get a running belief - net for this particular subdomain done in the next few weeks. So Bhaskara is switching projects as of the first of June, and uh, he's gonna leave us an inheritance, which is a uh hopefully a belief - net that does these things. And there're two aspects to it, one of which is, you know, technical, getting the coding right, and making it run, and uh stuff like that. And the other is the actual semantics. OK? What all you know, what are the considerations and how and what are the ways in which they relate. So he doe h he doesn't need help from this group on the technical aspects or if he does uh we'll do that separately.

Mm - hmm.

But in terms of what are the decisions and stuff like that, that's something that we all have to work out. Is is that right? I mean that's that's both you guys' understanding of where we are?

Absolutely.

OK.

So, I guess, um Is there like a latest version of the belief - net of the proposed belief - net? Like.

We had um decided.

like.

Um. Well, no, we didn't decide. We wanted to look into maybe getting it, the visualization, a bit clearer, but I think if we do it, um, sort of a paper version of all the nodes and then the connections between them, that should suffice.

Mm - hmm. Yeah, that should be fine.

Yeah I mean, that's a separate problem.

Yeah, I.

We do in the long run wanna do better visualization and all that stuff.

Yeah.

That's separable, yeah.

I did look into that, uh in terms of, you know, exploding the nodes out and down ag

Yep. Right.

JavaBayes does not support that. I can imagine a way of hacking at the code to do that. It'd probably take two weeks or so to actually go through and do it,

Not not at this point.

and I went through all the other packages on Murph - Kevin Murphy's page,

Right.

and I couldn't find the necessary mix of free and uh with the GUI and, with this thing that we want.

Well, we can p If it's If we can pay Yeah. If you know it's paying a thousand dollars or something we can do that. OK? So so don't view free as as a absolute constraint.

OK. OK, so then I'll go back and look at the ones on the list that.

OK. And you can ask Kevin.

But.

Yeah.

Mmm.

But.

Yeah, the one that uh people seem to use is uh Hugin or whatever?

Hugin, yeah that's free.

How exp I don't think it's Is it free? Because I've seen it advertised in places so I it seems to.

Uh, it may be free to academics. Like I I don't know. I have a co  I have a copy  that I l I downloaded.

OK.

So, at one point it was free.

OK.

Uh but yo I noticed people do use Hugin so um,

How do you spell that?

HUGIN.

Why

And Bhaskara can give you a pointer. So then, in any case, um But paying a lit You know, if i if it's uh Probably for university, it's it's gonna be real cheap anyway. But um, you know, if it's fifty thousand dollars we aren't gonna do it. I'm mean, we have no need for that.

I I also s would suggest not to d spend two weeks in in in changing the the JavaBayes code.

No,

Yeah.

he's not gonna do that.

OK.

I I will send you a pointer to a Java applet that does that, it's sort of a fish - eye. You you have a node, and you click on it, and it shows you all the connections,

Mmm.

and then if you click on something else that moves away, that goes into the middle. And maybe there is an easy way of interfacing those two. If that doesn't work, it's not a problem we we need to solve right now. What I'm what my job is, I will, um, give you the input in terms of of the internal structure. Maybe node by node, or something like this? Or should I collect it all

Mm - hmm.

and.

Doesn't matter.

Um, just any like like sort of rough representation of the entire belief - net is probably best.

OK. And um you're gonna be around? t again, always Tuesdays and Thursdays afternoon - ish? As usual? Or will that change?

Yeah I mean, yeah, I can like I c Um. This week I guess um, kind of I have a lot of projects and stuff but after that I will generally be more free. So yes, I might I can be around. And g I mean, generally if you email me also I can be around on other days.

Yeah. OK.

Yeah and this is not a crisis that I mean, you do, e everybody who's a student should, you know do their work, get their c courses all in good shape and and and and then we'll dig d dig down on this.

Yeah, that's Yeah. OK. No, that's good. That means I have I h I can spend this week doing it. So.

OK.

How do you go about this process of deciding what these connections are? I know that there's an issue of how to weight the different things too, and stuff. Right? I mean do you just sort of guess and see if it sort of.

Right. Well there there there There're two different things you do.

It's.

One is you design and the other is you learn. OK? So uh what we're gonna do initially is is do design, and, i if you will, guess.

OK.

OK. Uh that is you know use your best knowledge of of the domain to uh, hypothesize what the dependencies are and stuff.

Right. OK.

If it's done right, and if you have data then, there are techniques for learning the numbers given the structure

Yeah.

and there are even techniques for learning the structure, although that takes a lot more data, and it's not as @ @ and so forth and so on. So uh but for the limited amount of stuff we have for this particular exercise I think we'll just design it.

Alright.

Yeah. Fo - Hopefully as time passes we'll get more and more data from Heidelberg and from people actually using it and stuff.

OK.

So but this is the  long run.

Yeah.

But to solve our problems ag uh a mediocre design will do I think in the beginning.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, oh, and by the way, speaking of data, um, are there I could swore uh, I could swear I saw it sitting on someone's desk at some point, but is there a um a transcript of any of the, sort of, initial interactions of people with the with the system? Cuz you know, I'm still sort of itching to to look at what look at the stuff, and see what people are saying.

Mm - hmm. Yeah. Yeah make yourself a note. So and and, of course Keith would like the German as well as the English, so whatever you guys can get.

The German. Oh yeah, of course, German. Yeah.

Yeah, the y your native language, right? You remember that one.

OK. That's important, yeah.

Yeah,

So he'll get you some data.

u OK. Yeah, I mean I I sort of um found the uh, uh the audio of some of those, and um, it kind of sounded like I didn't want to trudge through that, you know.

Hmm.

It was just Strange, but.

Yep.

We probably will not get those to describe because they were trial runs.

Oh yeah, OK.

Um, but uh that's th but we have data in English and German already.

OK, yeah, I mean.

So. Transcribed. I will send you that. OK.

OK, so while we're still at this sort of top level, anything else that we oughta talk about today?

Ho - how was your thingy.

Oh, um, I just wanted to, uh, s like mention as an issue, um, you know last meeting I wasn't here because I went to a linguistics colloquium on the fictive motion stuff,

Oh right.

and that was pretty interesting and you know, I mean, seems to me that that will fairly obviously be of relevance to uh to what we're doing here because you know people are likely to give descriptions like you know, " What's that thing uh right where you start to go up the hill, " or something like that, you know, meaning a few feet up the hill or whatever from some reference point and all that stuff so I mean, I'm sure in terms of you know, people trying to state locations or, you know, all that kind of stuff, this is gonna be very relevant. So, um, now that was the talk was about English versus Japanese, um, which obviously the Japanese doesn't affect us directly, except that, um, some of the construction he'd what he talked about was that you know in English we say things like th you know, " your bike is parked across the street " and we use these prepositional phrases, you know, " well, if you were to move across the street you would be at the bike ", but um in in Japanese the the more conventionalized tendency is to use a sort of a description of " where one has crossed to the river, there is a tree ". Um, and you know, you can actually say things like, um, " there's a tree where one has crossed the river, but no one has ever crossed the river ", or something like that. So the idea is that this really is you know that's supposed show that's it's really fictive and so on. But um But the point is that that kind of construction is also used in English, you know, like " right where you start to go up the hill ", or " just when you get off the train ", or something like that to uh, to indicate where something is.

Mmm.

So we'll have to think about.

So how much is that used in German?

Um. The uh Well I wa I was on a uh on a on a different sidetrack.

Oh, OK.

I mean, the the Deep Map project which um is undergoing some renovation at at the moment, but this is a a three language project : German, English, Japanese.

OK.

And um, we have a uh, uh I have taken care that we have the the Japanese generation and stuff. And so I looked into uh spatial description. So we can generate spatial descriptions, how to get from A to B. And and information on objects, in German, English, and Japanese.

Mm - hmm.

And there is a huge uh project on spatial descriptions uh differences in spatial descriptions. Well, if yo if you're interested in that, so how how, I mean it does sort of go d all the way down to the conceptual level to some extent.

OK.

So. Um.

So, where is this huge project?

It's KLEIST. It's the uh Bielefeld generation of uh spatial descriptions and whatever.

Mm - hmm.

Well, that may be another thing that Keith wants to look at.

OK.

But um, I I think we should leave Japanese constructions maybe outside of the scope for for now,

Yeah.

but um definitely it's interesting to look at at cross the bordered there.

Mm - hmm.

Are are you going to p pay any attention to the relative position of of the direction relative relative to the speaker? For example, there are some differences between Hebrew and English. We can say um " park in front of the car " as you come beh you drive behind the car. In Hebrew it means " park behind the car ", because to follow the car is defined as it faces you.

Mm - hmm. Intrinsic, yeah.

While in English, front of the car is the absolute front of the car.

OK.

So.

Right, so the canonical direction of motion determines where the front is.

Right. Right.

OK.

So, i i i is German uh closer to to E uh, uh, uh, uh to E I mean uh

Mm - hmm.

I don't think it it's related to syntax, though, so it may be entirely different.

Um, as a matter of fact.

No, it's not.

Right.

Yeah.

Um. Did you ever get to look at the the rou paper that I sent you on the on that problem in English and German?

I think.

Carroll, ninety - three. Um. I There is a a study on the differences between English and German on exactly that problem.

Hmm.

So it's they actually say " the monkey in front of the car, where's the monkey? "

Mm - hmm.

And, um, they found statistically very significant differences in English and German, so I I I It might be, since there are only a finite number of ways of doing it, that that German might be more like Hebrew in that respect.

Hmm.

The solution they proposed was that it was due to syntactic factors.

That but it wasn't was.

That syntactic facto factors do do play a role there, wh whether you're more likely, you know, to develop uh, choices that lead you towards using uh intrinsic versus extrinsic reference frames.

Right. Mm - hmm. Right.

I mean, it seems to me that you can get both in in English depending o

Hmm.

You know, like, " in front of the car " could you know Like, here's the car sideways to me in between me and the car or something's in front of the car, or whatever. I could see that,

Absolutely.

but But anyway, so you know, I mean, this was this was a a very good talk on those kinds of issues and so on. So uh.

I can also give you uh, a pointer to a paper of mine which is the the ultimate taxonomy of reference frames.

Alright! Cool!

So.

Oh.

I'm the only person in the world who actually knows how it works.

Oh.

Not really.

Great. No, I've not seen that.

What do you mean. Um. " reference frames "?

It's called a.

uh uh

It's it's spatial reference frames. You actually have only Um. If you wanna have a This is usually um I should there should be an " L ", though. Well actually you have only have two choices. You can either do a two - point or a three - point which is you You're familiar with th with the " origo "? where that's the center " Origo " is the center of the f frame of reference.

Hmm.

And then you have the reference object and the object to be localized.

Hmm.

Mm - hmm.

OK? In some cases the origo is the same as the reference object.

So that would be " origin " in English,

This was like.

The origin.

Right

Yeah.

right?

" Origo " is a Terminus technikus. in that sense, that's even used in the English literature. " Origo. "

Oh, OK. I never heard it.

Alright.

OK.

OK.

And um, so, this video tape is in front of me.

Mm - hmm.

I'm the origo and I'm also the reference object.

Mm - hmm.

Right.

Those are two - point.

Mm - hmm.

And three - point relations is if something has an intrinsic front side like this chair then your f shoe is behind the chair.

Yeah.

Mm - hmm.

And, reference object and Um. No, from from my point of view your shoe is left of the chair.

Right. You you can actually say things like, um, " it's behind the tree from me " or something like that, I think, in in in certain circumstances in English, right? As sort of " from where I'm standing it would appear that ".

Yeah. Yeah. So,

Looks a little bit like Reichenbach for time.

Yeah, it sounds like it, doesn't it,

Yeah.

yeah.

It's a lot like it.

And then and then here you.

Um.

On this scale, you have it either be ego or allocentric.

Mm - hmm.

And that's  that's basically it. So. Egocentric two - point, egocentric three - point, or you can have allocentric.

Oh, OK.

So, " as seen from the church, the town hall is right of that um, fire station ". aa - huh  It's hardly ever used but it's w

I'd love to see it if you if you have a copy kind of. Uh.

Yeah.

Yeah. I see this is this is getting into Ami's thing.

Here

Mm - hmm.

He's he's very interested in that.

OK.

So.

Me too.

Uh. Yeah. Well, why don't you just put it on the web page? There's this EDU Right?

Yeah it's or or just Yeah.

Or a link to it.

It's also all on my my home page at EML. It's called " An Anatomy of a Spatial Description ".

Just

But I'll send that link.

OK, great.

Maybe just put a link on. Yeah.

Yep.

By the way, there something that I didn't know until about a week ago or so, is apparently, there are separate brain areas for things within reach, and things that are out of reach.

Yep.

Huh.

So there's there's uh all this linguistic stuff about you know, near and far, or yon and and so forth.

Mm - hmm.

So this is all This is There's this linguistic facts. But apparently, the Uh. Here's the way the findings go. That, you know they do MRI, and and if you're uh got something within reach then there's one of your areas lights up, and if something's out of reach uh a different one. But here's the the amazing result, um, they say. You get someone with a with a deficit so that they have a perfectly normal ability at distance things. So the s typical task is subdivision. So there's a a line on the wall over there, and you give them a laser pointer, and you say, " Where's the midpoint? " And they do fine. If you give them the line, and they have to touch it, they can't. There's just that part of the brain isn't functioning, so they can't do that. Here's the real experiment. The same thing on the wall, you give them a laser, " where is it? ",

Mm - hmm.

they do it. Give them a stick, long stick, and say " do it ", they can't do it. So there's a remapping of distant space into nearby space.

Right. So they doubled the the end the end of this.

Because it's within reach now?

Yeah,

It's not within reach and you use the Within - Reach uh, mechanism.

yeah.

Oh. Wow.

Circuits.

Right.

So I'll d I'll dig you up this reference.

That's cool.

And so this doe This is, uh First of all, it explains something that I've always wondered about and I'll do this this test on you guys as well. So. Uh. How - I have had an experience, not often, but a certain number of times, when, for example, I'm working with a tool, a screwdriver or something, for a long time, I start feeling the tip directly. Not indirectly, but you actually can feel the tip.

Yeah yeah.

And people who are uh accomplished violinists and stuff like that, claim they also have this kind of thing where you get a direct sensation of, physical sensation, of the end affector.

Yeah. What's going on at the end of the tool,

The ext the the The extension,

yeah.

Huh?

What's going on at the end of the tool, or whatever.

Yeah, within.

right.

Huh?

The extension of of your hand, right.

Yeah, right. Have you hav y h had this?

The I I think so. I mean i i it's not exactly the th same thing, but but s it it it's getting close to that.

Yeah.

W what does it feel like?

Oh i it feels like your as if your uh neurons had extended themselves out to this tool, and you're feeling forces on it and so forth and and you deal directly with it.

I once I I was playing you know with those um uh devices that allow you to manipulate objects when it's dangerous to get close? So you can insert your hand something

Oh, OK.

Right, yeah yeah yeah. Yeah.

and there's a correspondence between.

Yeah.

So I played with it. After a while, you don't feel the difference anymore. I I mean it's kind of.

Mm - hmm.

Yeah, right.

Very kind of you stop back and suddenly it goes away and you have to kind of work again to recapture it, but yeah.

Yeah.

Right, Yeah, so anyway, so So this was the first actual experimental evidence I'd seen that was consistent with this anecdotal stuff.

That's cool.

And of course it makes a lovely def uh story about why languages uh, make this distinction. Of course there are behavioral differences too. Things you can reach are really quite different than things you can't.

Yeah.

But there seems to be an actu really deep embodied neural difference. And i this is, um So. In addition to the e

This is more proximal - distal.

Yeah uh exactly. So in addition to e ego and allocentric uh which appear all over the place, you also apparently have this proximal - distal thing which is very deeply uh embedded. S

Well, Dan Montello sort of, he he does the uh uh th the cognitive map world, down in Santa Barbara. And he he always talks about these He he already well i probably most likely without knowing this this evidence uh is talking about these small scale spaces that you can manipulate versus large scale environmental spaces.

Yeah. Well there's there's uh been a lot of behavioral things o on this, but that was the first neur neuro - physiological thing I saw. Anyway yeah, so we'll we'll look at this. And. So, all of these issues now are now starting to come up. So, now we're now done with demos. We're starting to do science, right? And so these issues about uh, reference, and spatial  reference, discourse reference, uh - uh - uh - uh  all this sort of stuff, uh, deixis which is part of what you were talking about,

Mm - hmm. Mm - hmm.

um So, all of this stuff is coming up essentially starting now. So we gotta do all this. So there's that. And then there's also a set of system things that come up. So " OK, we're not using their system. That means we need our system. "

Mm - hmm.

Right?

Yeah.

It it follows. And so, uh, in addition to the business about just getting the linguistics right, and the formalism and stuff, we're actually gonna build something and uh, Johno is point person on the parser, analyzer, whatever that is, and we're gonna start on that in parallel with the um, the grammar stuff.

Alright.

But to do that we're gonna need to make some decisions like ontology, so, um And so this is another thing where we're gonna, you know, have to get involved and make s relatively early I think, make some decisions on uh, " is there an ontology API that that " There's a sort of standard way of getting things from ontologies and we build the parser and stuff around that, or is there a particular ontology that we're gonna standardize on, and if so For example, is there something that we can use there. i Does uh either the uh SmartKom project or one of the projects at EML have something that we can just p pull out, for that. Uh, so there are gonna be some some some things like that, which are not science but system. But we aren't gonna ignore those cuz we're we're not only going The plan is not only to lay out this thing, but to actually uh build some of it. And how much we build, and and so forth.

I.

Uh. Part of it, if it works right, is wh It looks like we're now in a position that the construction analyzer that we want for this applied project can be the same as the construction analyzer that Nancy needs for the child language modeling. So. It's always been out of phase but it now seems that um, there's a good shot at that. So we've talked about it, and the hope is that we can make these things the same thing,

OK.

and of course it's only w In both cases it's only one piece of a bigger system.

Mm - hmm.

But it would be nice if that piece were exactly the same piece.

Right.

It was just this uh construction analyzer. And so we think we think we have a shot at at that.

OK.

So. The for So. To to come full circle on that, this formalization task, OK? is trying to get the formalism into into a shape where it can actually uh

Yeah. Be of use to someone who's trying to do this, right?

d Well, yeah, where it actually is is covers the whole range of things. And the the the the thing that got Mark into the worst trouble is he had a very ambitious thing he was trying to do, and he insisted on trying to do it with a limited set of mechanisms. It turned out, inherently not to cover the space.

OK.

And it just it was just terribly frustrating for him,

Yeah.

and he seemed fully committed to both sides of this i i irreconcilable thing.

I see. Right.

And. Uh. Johno is much more pragmatic.

OK. Good to know.

Uh. Huh? Is This is true, is it not?

Yes.

OK. So there's you know sort of, yeah, deep, really deep, emotional commitment to a certain theory being uh, complete.

Oh, OK.

You don't have a hidden purist streak?

Oh no.

We - well it hasn't it it certainly hasn't been observed, in any case.

OK. Just checking.

No sir.

Alright.

Um. Now, you do, but that's OK. Uh. So. For for.

Cuz I don't have to implement anything.

Exactly right. Exactly.

I have a problem, then. It's So. Whether I do depends on whether I'm talking to him or him probably.

Hmm.

Yeah, right.

Right. Why a actually, uh, the thing is, you you do but, th the thing you have to im implement is so small that Uh.

Which meeting I'm in. It's OK to be purist within that context.

Within that, yeah,

Yes,

and uh, it's a and still, I think, you know, get something done.

good.

Cool!

But to try to do something upscale and purist Particularly if if um what you're purist about doesn't actually work, is real hard.

Yay.

Mm - hmm. Yeah.

OK. And then the other thing is while we're doing this uh Robert's gonna pick a piece of this space,

It's possible yeah.

OK.

OK, uh, for his absentee thesis. I think you all know that that you can just, in Germany almost just send in your thesis.

Just a drive up. Ca - chuk!

Um

Yeah right.

There you go.

OK.

The - th There there's a drive - in thesis uh sh joint over in Saarbruecken.

Exactly. Drive through, yeah.

It costs a lot. The the amount You put in your credit card and as well. But, uh, But anyway, so, uh, that's um, also gotta be worked out, hopefully over the next few weeks, so that that it becomes clear uh, what piece uh, Robert wants to jump into. And, while we're at this level, uh, there's at least one new doctoral student in computer science who will be joining the project, either next week or the first of August, depending on the blandishments of Microsoft.

OK.

So, de Uh. And her name is Eva.

OK.

It really is. Nobody believed th th that.

Yeah, I thought it had to be a joke, of your part, you know

Yeah.

like  " Johno made it up, I'm sure. "

Is this person someone who's in first - year this year,

No, first year coming.

or

So, she's she's now out here she's moved, and she'll be a student as of then.

OK.

And probably she'll pick up from you on the belief - net stuff, so sh she'll be chasing you down and stuff like that.

OK.

Uh.

Document.

Right.

Uh, against all traditions. And actually I talked today to a uh undergraduate who wants to do an honors thesis on this. Uh.

Someone from the class?

No, interestingly enough.

We always get these people who are not in the class, who.

Some of th some of them, yeah.

It's interesting.

So anyway, uh, but uh she's another one of these ones with a three point nine average and so forth and so on.

Mm - hmm.

Uh, so, um, I've give I've given her some things to read. So we'll see how this goes. Oh there's yet another one of the incoming first  incoming first - year graduate students who's expressed interest, so we'll see how that goes. Um, anyway, so, I think as far as this group goes, um, it's certainly worth continuing for the next few weeks to get closure on the uh belief - net and the ideas that are involved in that, and what are th what are the concepts. We'll see whether it's gonna make sense to have this be separate from the other bigger effort with the formalization stuff or not, I'm not sure. It partly depends on w what your thesis turns out to be and how that goes. S so, we'll see. And then, Ami, you can decide, you know, how much time you wanna put into it and uh, it it's beginning to take shap shape,

OK.

so uh and,

Right

I think you will find that if you want to look technically at some of the your traditional questions in this light, uh Keith, who's buil building constructions, will be quite happy to uh see what, you know, you envision as the issues and the problems and um, how they might uh get reflected in constructions.

Sure.

I suspect that's right.

Yeah. Yeah.

I I may have to go to Switzerland for in June or beginning of July for between two weeks and four weeks, but uh, after that or before that.

OK, fine. And, um, if it's useful we can probably arrange for you to drop by and visit either at Heidelberg or at the German AI center, while you're in in the neighborhood.

Right. Yeah be uh actu actually I'm invited to do some consulting with a bank in Geneva which has an affiliation with a research institute in Geneva, which I forgot the name of.

Yeah. Yep. E o do y

Yeah.

Well, we we're connected to uh There's a there's a a very significant connection between We'll we'll go through this,

Yeah.

ICSI and EPFL, which is the, uh It's the Fr Ge - Germany's got two big technical institutes. There's one in in Zurich,

Mm - hmm.

E T and then there's one, the French speaking one, in Lausanne,

Oh, so in Switzerland.

OK? which is uh E P

Great.

F L. So find out who they are associated with in Geneva.

Right.

Probably we're connected to them.

Great. I'll let you know. S I'll send you email.

OK. Yeah, and so anyway we c uh We can m undoubtedly get Ami uh to give a talk at uh EML or something like that. While he's in in uh.

Hmm. Uh. I I think the one you you gave here a couple of weeks ago would be of interest there, too.

Sure, yeah.

A lot of interest. Actually, either place, DFKI or uh Yeah, so, and and if there is a book, that you'll be building up some audience for it.

Yeah. Right.

And you'll get feedback from these guys.

Great, yeah.

Cuz they've actually these DFKI guys have done as much as anyone over the last decade in trying to build them. So we'll set that up.

Cool.

OK. So, uh, unless we wanna start digging into the uh the belief - net and the decisions now, which would be fine, it's probably.

I I tho It's probably better if I come next week with the um version O point nine of the structure.

OK. So, how about if you two guys between now and next week come up with something that is partially proposal, and partially questions, saying " here's what we think we understand, here are the things we think we don't understand ". And that we as a group will try to to finish it. What I'd like to do is shoot f for finishing all this next Monday.

Sure.

OK? Uh, " these are the decisions " I don't think we're gonna get lots more information. It's a design problem.

Mm - hmm.

You know. We.

Yeah.

Yeah. And let's come up with a first cut at what this should look like. And then finish it up.

OK.

Does that so make sense?

OK.

And um, the the sem semester will be over next week but then you have projects for one more week to come?

No, I I think I'll be done everything by this uh by the end of this week.

Same with you? No.

Nnn. This Well, I've I have projects, but then the my prof professor of one of my classes also wa has a final that he's giving us. And he's giving us five days to do it which means it going to be hard.

Yeah.

Yeah. Oh. is it a take - home final? Who's doing this?

Yeah. Aikin, Alex, yeah.

Yeah, figured. That would have been i my guess.

Hmm.

Right. Um, But anyway, yeah.

Pretty soon.

OK.

OK, so I guess that's

So, the seventeenth will definitely be the last day, like it or not for me.

Right. right. So let's do this, and then we we well there's gonna be some separate co these guys are talking, uh we have a group on the formalization, uh Nancy and Johno and I are gonna talk about parsers. So there're various kinds of uh.

OK.

Of course, nothing gets done even in a meeting of seven people,

Right.

right? So, um, two or three people is the size in which actual work gets done.

Mmm.

Yeah.

So we'll do that. Great. Oh, the other thing we wanna do is catch up with uh, Ellen and see what she's doing because the um image schemas are going to be um, an important pa

Yeah. Quite relevant, yeah.

We we want those,

Yeah, oh yeah.

right? And we want them formalized and stuff like that.

Yeah.

So let me let me make a note to do that.

OK. Yeah, I'm actually probably going to be in contact with her uh pretty soon anyway because of various of us students were going to have a reading group about precisely that sort of thing over the summer,

OK.

Oh right! Right right right!

so.

That's great! Yeah, I I Shweta mentioned that, although she said it's a secret.

OK.

Hi

Right, no faculty!

Th - the faculty aren't faculty aren't supposed to know.

Wednesday's much better for me, yeah.

But um, I'm sufficiently clueless that I count as a.

Yeah, right. It's as if we didn't tell anyone at all,

Bhaskara.

right.

Question: Why was it decided to switch the research focus from the applied project to the basic issues?

Response: The decision to switch the research focus was made as a group. The participants wanted to gain closure on the applied project, but wanted to prevent that from becoming a long-term focus. The group wanted to spend the summer working on the basic issues so they could step back from the applied project and keep the context open for future considerations.

Question: What did Professor C recommend when discussing the formalization of the notation?

Response: Professor C felt that it was not worth going over the details of the formalization process in the group, but that the participants should ask Johno individually if they had questions.

Question: What was the decision made for parsing?

Response: The participants decided to focus on a general case parsing system. They wanted to worry about creating a cut down version or any other constraints later.

Question: What details did Professor C provide regarding the ontology API?

Response: Professor C discussed the specifics of an ontology API in the meeting.

Question: Can you summarize the primary outcomes of the meeting?

Response:
* The participants decided to switch from the applied project to basic research issues in order to gain closure, keep the context open, and prevent the applied project from becoming a long-term focus.
* The participants decided to focus on the general case parsing system and any cut-down versions or constraints would be addressed later.

Question: What was the advantage of using a belief-net?

Response: A belief network model will be constructed to manage the inferences needed to answer user queries. The belief network model will be designed, implemented, and connected to the rest of the system in the coming weeks.

Question: What did the participants hope to gain from focusing on the basic issues surrounding the research project instead of the applied project?

Response: The participants hoped that focusing on the basic issues surrounding the research project instead of the applied project would allow them to gain closure on the applied project, keep the context open for future considerations, and prevent the applied project from becoming a long-term focus.

Question: What did the group decide on regarding the ontology API?

Response: The group makes some decisions about the ontology API and the standard way of getting things from ontologies, and we build the parser and stuff around the particular ontology that we're going to standardise on.

Question: Other than the belief-net, what other technical issues did the group discuss?

Response: The transcript does not contain information regarding any other technical issues the group discussed other than the belief net.

Question: What were their decisions about the construction analyzer?

Response: The participants decided to make the construction analyzer the same for the child language modeling and applied projects if possible. This could be possible because they think the projects are now in a phase where they could use the same analyzer.


Test.

OK.

Let's see, I should be Two.

Up high.

As close to your mouth as you can get it.

La

high as you can get.

Is this channel one?

Yeah, on your upper lip.

Channel one one one.

Gee, OK. Yes. OK.

OK, so for for For people wearing the wireless mikes, like like this one, I find the easiest way to wear it is sorta this this sorta like that.

This is chan channel channel one one two three

Channel five, channel five.

Yeah. Mm - hmm. What do you do,

It's actually a lot more comfortable then if you try to put it over your temples,

Test, test test.

you do it higher?

so.

Mm - hmm.

Adam's just trying to generate good uh data for the recognizer there.

Yeah, I think we're supposed to that's right.

And then also, for for all of them, if your boom is adjustable, the boom should be towards the corner of your mouth,

Test test.

By the way, there was a bug. Yeah, i it wasn't using the proper

Oh it was.

and about a uh a thumb to a thumb and a half distance away from your mouth,

basically it wasn't adapting anything.

Oh.

so about like I'm wearing it now.

Oh that's interesting. So why didn't you get the same results and the unadapted?

so so Jane, you could actually do even a little closer to your mouth,

It's not always possible.

Hmm?

Why didn't you get the same results and the unadapted?

I could can this be adjuste like this?

but.

Oh, because when it estimates the transformer pro produces like a single matrix or something.

Yep.

Is that @ @? OK, thank you.

Adam, I'm not.

O Oh oh I see.

uh, looks kinda low on channel five.

I see, I see.

OK.

no?

Channel five, s speak again.

Maybe not.

Hello.

Basically there were no counts

Yeah, that's alright.

Hello?

I mean, we could we could up the gain slightly if you wanted to.

It's OK?

Yeah.

Is this OK?

OK.

I see what you mean.

Who's channel B?

but Uh, channel B is probably Liz.

Uh oh.

Uh channel B I am channel B.

You wanna close this,

Channel eight, eight.

or

No I

Thank you.

No, channel B.

Hello, hello.

yeah, yeah, you're channel B.

Yeah, yeah.

So can you talk a bit? I thought it might be too

OK, yeah, channel B, one two three four five.

OK.

Yeah, it's alright. So, the gain isn't real good.

We're recording,

OK.

right?

OK, so we are recording.

Ah.

Yeah.

OK.

Um everyone should have at least two forms possibly three in front of you depending on who you are.

Oh.

Um we we're doing a new speaker form and you only have to spea fill out the speaker form once but everyone does need to do it. And so that's the name, sex, email, et cetera.

Mm - hmm.

We we had a lot of discussion about the variety of English and so on so if you don't know what to put just leave it blank. Um I I designed the form and I don't know what to put for my own region,

Mmm.

so

California.

I think.

California.

California.

Um may I make one suggestion? Instead of age put date of uh year of birth

Sure.

because age will change, but The year of birth changes, you know, stays the same, usually.

Oh.

A actually, wait a minute,

Birth year?

Although on.

Yeah.

shouldn't it be the other way around?

Not for me.

course on the other on the other hand you could you view it as the age at the time of the.

On the other side,

Well the thing is, if ten years from now you look at this form knowing that.

yeah.

Yes, but what we care about is the age at at the recording date rather than the.

O yeah.

But there's no other date on the form.

W we don't care how they old they really are.

Well well I don't know.

Yes. Unless we wanna send them a card.

Well I guess it depends on how long the corpus is gonna be collected for.

Anyway.

Yeah, that's true.

I still don't see the problem.

Either way yeah I think I think age is alright

OK.

and then um there will be attached to this a point or two these forms uh so that you'll be able to extract the date off that

Mm - hmm.

so, anyway. And so then you also have a digits form which needs to be filled out every time, the speaker form only once, the digit form every time even if you don't read the digits you have to fill out the digits form so that we know that you were at the meeting. OK? And then also if you haven't filled one out already you do have to fill out a consent form. And that should just be one person whose name I don't know. OK?

Do you want this Adam?

Uh sure. Thank you.

So uh

OK so should we do agenda items?

Uh oh that's a good idea. I shouldn't run the meeting.

Uh well I have I wanna talk about new microphones and wireless stuff.

Mmm.

And I'm sure Liz and Andreas wanna talk about recognition results. Anything else?

I guess what time do we have to leave? Three thirty?

Yeah.

Yeah,

Why don't you go first then.

so.

Yeah, good idea.

OK.

Um Well, I I sent out an email s couple hours ago so um with Andreas' help um Andreas put together a sort of no frills recognizer which is uh gender - dependent but like no adaptation, no cross - word models, no trigrams a bigram recognizer and that's trained on Switchboard which is telephone conversations. Um and thanks to Don's help wh who Don took the first meeting that Jane had transcribed and um you know separated used the individual channels we segmented it in into the segments that Jane had used and uh Don sampled that so so eight K um and then we ran up to I guess the first twenty minutes, up to synch time of one two zero zero so is that that's twenty minutes or so? Um yeah because I guess there's some,

Or so.

and Don can talk to Jane about this, there's some bug in the actual synch time file that ah uh I'm we're not sure where it came from but stuff after that was a little messier. Anyway so it's twenty minutes and I actually

Hmm.

um

I was that did that did that recording have the glitch in the middle?

I'm puzzled by that. I oh oh, I see.

There's there's a.

Oh there was a glitch somewhere.

yeah, so that actually um

Was it twenty minutes in,

if it was twenty minutes in then I don't know

I forgot about that.

I thought.

Well it was interesting,

Well, I mean, they.

suddenly the the overall error rate when we first ran it was like eighty percent

I don't remember when it is.

but I was able to can transcribe

but i looking at the first sentences looked much better than that and then suddenly it turned very bad and then we noticed that the reference was always one off with the it was actually recognized

Wel

Oh no.

Yeah, that might be that might be that might be my fault.

Wow.

so

Oh so that was just a parsing mismatch.

I'm not.

OK.

No actually it was yeah i it was a complicated bug because they were sometimes one off and then sometimes totally random so um

yeah, I was pretty certain that it worked up until that time,

Oh. That's not good.

Yeah

OK.

so that's what we have

Alright.

so

but that that will be completely gone if this synch time problem

Yeah.

The the glitch

So so we have everything recognized but we scored only the first uh whatever, up to that time to

And the only glitch.

yeah.

yeah.

So you guys know.

S sorry I haven't seen the email,

Yeah.

Th - the

The the well wait

what was the score?

So here's the actual copy of the email

we should say something about the glitch. He he can say something about the glitch.

um oh OK

yeah.

Cuz it's it's it's h it's it's very small.

so does this glitch occur at other.

There there there's an acoustic glitch that occurs where um the channels get slightly asynchronized

very small. Yep.

Oh.

Mmm.

Right.

so the that that problem has gone away in the original driver believe it or not when the SSH key gen ran the driver paused for a fraction of a second

Hmm.

Hmm.

and so the channels get a little asynchronous and so if you listen to it in the middle there's a little part where it starts doing doing click sounds.

So.

And is it only once that that happens?

But yeah

OK.

it right once in the middle.

There's the previous page has some more information about sort of what was wrong

so so un unsurprisingly Adam is the golden voice,

but

Um But that shouldn't affect anything

OK so that's actually

S and it.

you see this here?

It y it's.

yeah yeah " bah "

OK no.

Oh, and.

What happens is it actually affects the script that Don.

Huh.

I mean if we know about it then I guess it could always be checked for it

Well the acoustic one shouldn't do anything.

but they

Yeah, I don't know exactly what affected it

I agree. I agree.

I I have.

but I'll I'll talk to you about it,

Yeah.

But I I do remember.

Yeah.

I'll show you the point.

Yeah. It it had no effect on my transcription,

Mmm.

you know, I mean I I had no trouble hearing it and and having time bins

I do remember seeing once the transcriber produce an incorrect XML file where one of the synch numbers was incorrect.

but there was a Oh.

Well, the the synch time the synch numbers have more significant digits than they should,

That's what happened.

Oh.

Yeah.

Where where they weren't monotonic.

There was yeah, I mean.

right? There's things that are l in smaller increments than a frame.

Yeah.

Oh, interesting.

And so then, I mean you look at that and it's got you know more than three significant digits in a synch time then that can't be right

Oh OK so that's

Hmm.

Oh.

Mmm.

so anyway it's it's just.

yeah sounds like a bug.

Yeah.

that's why we only have twenty minutes but there's a significant amount of.

Non - zero? Um there are like more cuz there's a lot of zeros I tacked on just because of the way the script ran,

The other one I saw was that it yeah.

I mean but there were there was a point.

Yeah that was fine. That that was OK.

The other one I saw was non non - monotonic synch times

OK.

and that definitely indicra indicates a bug.

Uh.

Well that would really be a problem, yeah. So anyway these are just the ones that are the prebug for one meeting.

Yeah.

um and what's which.

So that's very encouraging.

this is really encouraging cuz this is free recognition,

Hmm.

Yeah.

Cool.

Mmm.

there's no I mean the language model for Switchboard is totally different so you can see some like this Trent Lott which

Trent Lott.

um I mean these are sort of funny ones,

It'll get those though.

there's a lot of perfect ones and good ones and all the references, I mean you can read them and when we get more results you can look through and see

I and as I said I would like to look at the lattices

Mm - hmm.

but um it's pretty good.

because it sounded like even the ones it got wrong it sort of got it right?

Well so I guess we can generate

Sounds likes?

There are a fair number of errors that are, you know where got the plural S wrong or the inflection on the verb wrong.

Mm - hmm.

um

Yeah, and who cares? And and there were lots of of course the " uh uh " - s, " in on " - s " of uh " - s.

Mmm, so if.

there's No those are actually

Yeah.

a lot of the errors I think are out of vocabulary,

Mm - hmm.

so is it like PZM is three words, it's PZM,

Mm - hmm.

I mean there's nothing There's no language model for PZM or

Right. Ri - ri right.

um

Did you say there's no language for PZM?

No language model, I mean those.

Do you mean so every time someone says PZM it's an error? Maybe we shouldn't say PZM in these meetings.

Well well there's all kinds of other stuff like Jimlet and I mean um anyway there.

Yeah, that's right, Jimlet.

Well, we don't even know what that means,

so but this is really encouraging because

so I

Yeah, that's right.

so, I mean the bottom line is even though it's not a huge amount of data um it should be uh reasonable to actually run recognition and be like within the scope of of r reasonable s you know Switchboard this is like h about how well we do on Switchboard - two data with the Switchboard - one trained mostly trained recognizer

Right.

and Switchboard - two is got sort of a different population of speakers and a different topic

Excellent.

and they're talking about things in the news that happened after Switchboard - one so there was @ @ so that's great.

Yeah. Yeah so we're in better shape than we were say when we did had the ninety - three workshop

Um

and we were all getting like seventy percent error on Switchboard.

Mm - hmm.

Oh yeah

you know

I mean this is really,

Mmm.

and thanks to Andreas who, I mean this is a

Mmm.

Well especially for the very first run, I mean you.

Oh it's the.

Yeah.

eh um

Yeah.

yeah

the first run I ran of Switchboard I got a hundred twenty percent word error but

So and what al also this means is that

Right.

um

Not Switchboard,

Well it's.

I mean there's a bunch of things in this note to various people

uh Broadcast News.

especially I guess um with Jane that that would help for since we have this new data now uh in order to go from the transcripts more easily to um just the words that the recognizer would use for scoring. I had to deal with some of it by hand but I think a lot of it can be automated s by.

Oh one thing I guess I didn't get so you know the language model was straight from from bigram from Switchboard the acoustic models were also from Switchboard or or

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they didn't have anything from this acoustic data in yet?

That's amazing.

Yeah, so that's great.

No.

OK.

And actually we actually um used Switchboard telephone bandwidth models

That's amazing.

Well that's those are the only we ones there are,

Yeah.

which I guess

I was just gonna say,

so that's the on that's the only acoustic training data that we have a lot of

yeah.

I mean

Yeah.

Right.

and I guess Ramana, so a guy at SRI said that um there's not a huge amount of difference going from.

Right.

it's it's not like we probably lose a huge amount but we won't know because we don't have any full band models for s conversational speech.

It's probably not as bad as going f using full band models on telephone band speech

So.

Oh yeah.

Right.

right?

Yeah.

Yeah,

Right, so it's so

but for Broadcast News when we we played around between the two there wasn't a huge loss.

Right, it was not a big deal.

Yeah

I should I should say that the language model is not just Switchboard

so I wou so that's good.

Although combining em worked well.

it's also I mean there's uh actually more data is from Broadcast News but with a little less weight

Yeah.

uh because

Uh - huh.

Like Trent Lott must have been from

mm - hmm, right.

I guess Switchboard was before

Um By the way just for fun we also ran,

uh.

Good point.

I mean our complete system starts by doing ge a gender detection

Mm - hmm.

so just for the heck of it I ran that

And it said a hundred percent male?

um and it might be reassuring for everybody to know that it got all the genders right.

The j

Yeah so

Oh it did?

Oh that's I'm glad.

It got all two genders?

Yeah but you know Jane and Adam have you kn about equal performance

Yeah. Yes.

and uh and that's interesting cuz I think the their language models are quite different so and I I'm pretty sure from listening to Eric that, you know given the words he was saying and given his pronunciation that the reason that he's so much worse is the lapel.

Yeah.

Right.

That makes a lot of sense,

So it's nice now if we can just sort of eliminate the lapel one when when we get new microphones

yeah. Very possible.

Yeah I I I would bet on that too

that would be worth it

cuz he certainly in that when as a as a burp user he was he was a pretty uh strong one.

um Yeah

Sheep.

he he he sounded to me just from he sounded like a,

Yeah.

what's it a sheep or a goat?

Sheep.

A sheep.

Sheep,

Baah.

Yeah. Sheep is good.

right. Sounded good.

Yeah.

Right so um so I guess the good news is that

Mm - hmm.

and and again this is without a lot of the sort of bells and whistles that we c can do with the SRI system and we'll have more data and we can also start to maybe adapt the language models once we have enough meetings. So this is only twenty minutes of one meeting with no no tailoring at all.

I mean clearly there are um with just a small amount of uh actual meeting transcriptions uh thrown into the language model you can probably do quite a bit better because the.

Yeah. The voca the vocabulary especially

Or just dictionary.

yeah.

Not that much the vocabulary actually

Yeah, so.

I think um well we have to see but it's uh.

Yeah. It's pretty good um so then

Have to add PZM and so on

And I have to try it on the far field mike

but

PZM

yeah.

and then there's things like for the transcription I got when someone has a digit in the transcript I don't know if they said, you know one one or eleven and I don't know if they said Tcl or TCL. there's things like that where, you know the um we'll probably have to ask the transcribers to indicate some of those kinds of things but in general it was really good and I'm hoping and this is this is good news because that means the force alignments should be good and if the force alignments, I mean it's good news anyway but if the force alignments are good we can get all kinds of information. For example about, you know prosodic information and speaker overlaps and so forth directly from the aligned times. Um so that'll be something that actually in order to assess the forced alignment um we need s some linguists or some people to look at it and say are these boundaries in about the right place. Because it's just gonna give us time marks

But you know.

Well we've done that for one meeting.

so. For forced alignment.

Uh oh oh f not for words

Ye - right.

I'm sorry just for overlaps is we did it for not not for words.

Right. So this would be like if you take the words um you know and force align them on all the individual close talk uh close talking mikes then how good are these sort of in reality

Right.

and then I was thinking it.

So we might want to take twenty minutes and do a closer word level transcription. Maybe actually mark the word boundaries.

Oh or i have someone look at the alignments uh maybe a linguist who can say um you know roughly if these are OK and how far away they are.

Yeah.

Um but I think it's gotta be pretty good because otherwise the word recognition would be really b crummy.

Right, right.

It wouldn't necessarily be the other way around, if the wor word recognition was crummy the alignment might be OK but if the word recognition is this good the alignment should be pretty good. So that's about it.

I r

I wonder if this is a good thing or a bad thing though, I mean if we're pr

That we're starting so well?

yeah if we're producing a database that everybody's gonna do well on

Oh

Don't worry about it w d that's that's the close talking mikes. Try it on the P Z Ms and and

Yeah, which I would which well n n n n

So the real value of the database is these?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, abso well no but

I mean there's still just the w the percentages and, I mean they're not a as we've talked about before there's probably overlaps

This i yeah. This is not that good.

there's probably overlaps in in uh in fair number in Switchboard as well so but but there's other phenomena, it's a meeting, it's a different thing and there's lots of stuff to learn with the close talking mikes but uh yeah certainly I'd like to see as soon as we could, I mean maybe get some of the glitches out of the way but soon as we could how well it does with say with the P Z Ms or maybe even one of the

Right.

and uh see if it's, you know is it a hundred twenty percent or maybe it's not maybe if with some adaptation you get this down to fifty percent or forty - five percent or something and and then if for the PZM it's seventy or something like that that's actually something we could sort of work with a little bit

Yeah.

so

No I think it's really, I mean this way we least have a baseline we know that for instance the transcripts are very good so once you can get to the words that the recognizer which is a total subset of the things you need to understand the the text um yeah they're pretty good so and and it's converting automatically from the XML to the chopping up the wave forms and so forth it's not the case that the end of one utterance is in the next segment and things like that which we had more problems with in Switchboard so that's good. And um let's see there was one more thing I wanted to to mention I can't remember um Sorry can't remember. anyway it's.

Congratulations is really great.

Yeah.

well it was, I mean I really didn't do this myself

Yeah, it's really good.

so Andreas set up this recognizer and by the way the recognizer all the files I'm moving to SRI and running everything there so I brought back just these result files and people can look at them um so

We we talked about setting up the SRI recognizer here. That's you know if if there are more machines um uh here plus people can could run their own uh you know variants of of of the recognition runs um certainly doable. Um.

Yeah and well certainly if the recognition as opposed to training, yeah.

Yeah.

Seems reasonable.

I need t Hmm. I need to ask one question.

Yeah.

Which is um so this issue of the uh legalistic aspects of the pre - sent you know pre - adapted Yeah, well, so what I mean is um the uh the data that you take into SRI, first first question, you're maintaining it in in a place that wouldn't be publicly readable that that kind of stuff, right?

U um

From the outside world or

By uh people uh who are not associated with this project.

Oh.

It's human subjects issues, I told you about that.

Um oh.

Exactly.

Well OK we have n no names. Although I sh um

That that's not the issue,

de audio data itself?

it's just the audio data itself, until people have a chance to edit it.

Mm - hmm, exactly.

Uh so well I can I can protect my directories through there.

Yeah.

Right now they're not they're in the speech group directories which so I will.

Great.

I didn't know that actually.

Yeah so we just have to go through this process of having people approve the transcriptions,

Yeah OK.

say it's OK.

Right OK.

Yeah, we had to get them to approve em and then i cuz cuz the other question I was gonna ask is if we're having um you know it's but this this meeting that you have, no problem cuz I I well I mean I I speak for myself

It's us.

but but I think that we didn't do anything that but well anyway so uh I wouldn't be too concerned about it with respect to that although we should clear it with Eric and Dan of course but these results are based on data which haven't had the uh haven't had the chance to be reviewed by the subjects

That's true.

and I don't know how that stands, I mean if you if you get fantastic results and it's involving  data which which later end up being lessened by, you know certain elisions, then I don't know but I wanted to raise that issue,

Well we,

that's all.

I mean once we get all this streamlined it may be sh it hopefully it will be fairly quick but we get the transcriptions, people approve them and so on it's just that we're

Alright we need to work at a system for doing that approval so that we can send people the transcripts

Great.

Mmm.

Yeah.

and get back any bleeps that they want

Yeah actually the bleeps are also an issue I thought.

It's gonna be a rare thing that there's a bleep for the most part.

U uh actually I had a question about the downsampling, um I don't know who, I mean how this was done but is is there are there any um issues with downsampling

Don did this.

because I know that the recognizer um that we use h can do it sort of on the fly um so we wouldn't have to have it eh you know do it uh explicitly beforehand. And is there any um i are there other d sev uh is there more than one way to do the downsampling where one might be better than another?

There are lots of w there are lots of ways to do the downsampling um different filters to put on,

OK. Right. OK.

like anti - aliasing stuff.

So so the th

I don't think we even know which one I assume you're using syncat to do it?

No, I'm using uh SN SND uh are resample.

Or sound resample?

Re - re ref

Resample.

yeah.

Yeah and Dan's archaic acronyms.

RSMP. Yeah, I don't really.

Missing all the vowels.

I just yeah I found it.

Some of the vowels,

Not all of them.

almost all the vowels, that's the hard part.

So so the other thing we should try is to just take the original wave forms,

And a few of the consonants.

I mean segment them but not downsample them.

Yeah we could we could try that and and compare

And and feed them to feed them to the SRI recognizer and see if if the SRI front - end does something.

Yeah, that's.

Yeah.

I suspect that's sort of premature optimization, but Sure.

We can try it. I I only downsampled them first cuz I was

Well.

I mean that's just one line that's one line of code to comment at

yeah

Right and and it doesn't is no more work for um you know for us.

so

Mm - hmm.

Yeah.

Well they're just bigger to transfer, that's why I s downsampled them before but

Well but they're only twice as big so

Well I mean that was if it's the same then we can downsample here

I mean it's it's just a

but if it's.

Although those eighty meg files take a while to copy into my directories

Yeah.

so, but no, I mean it's not i it wouldn't be a problem if you're interested in it.

We could try that.

Yeah I mean it would be uh you know it would probably take uh about um you know

it would.

minus the transfer time it would it would take uh you know ten minutes to try and and and

Yeah.

It's about a fifty minute drive, right?

And and if for some reason we see that it works better then we might investigate why

Well it takes more disk space too so I was just.

and, you know, what Yeah.

Mmm. In the front - end we could do that.

Yeah.

So you just train just different filters

Yeah, I.

and so you're just wondering whether the filter is

Yeah, I can imagine it would be.

Right. Right.

So we could try that with this particular twenty minutes of speech and sort of see if there's any differences.

I mean I guess there's some.

You know a at some point someone might have optimized whatever filtering is done for the actual recognition um performance.

Hmm.

So in other words right,

Right.

so

It just seems to me that, you know small changes to the language model and the vocabulary will so swamp that that it may be premature to worry about that. I mean so one is a half a percent better than the other I don't think that gives you any information.

Well it's just as easy to to give you the sixteen K individual,

Yep.

it was just more disk space you know for storing them

Are you are you using uh uh mel cepstrum or PLP over there?

so

Mel cepstrum.

So probably doesn't matter.

Well we could try.

There's there's your answer.

But but it wouldn't hurt to try,

Could easily try

That's what I would assume but you never know,

yeah.

so

you know.

Sure. No the reason I say this

Just Mm - hmm.

PLP uses uh auto - regressive filtering and uh modeling and so it can be sensitive to the kind of filtering that you're doing

Mm - hmm.

but uh uh mel cepstrum uh might not b you wouldn't expect to be so much but

Well we can try it if you generate like the same set of files just up to that point where we stopped anyway and just sti stick them somewhere

Yeah, it's it's really not a problem.

Actually, no.

and I'll rerun it with

Don't stop. Don't stop at that part because we're actually using the entire conversation to estimate the speaker parameters,

Keep going. Yeah.

so shouldn't use you should s you know, get

Yeah, I mean I'll I have to do is eh e the reference file would stay the same,

OK.

Right.

it's just the individual segments would be approximately twice as long

Mmm.

Right. Right.

and I could just replace them with the bigger ones in the directory,

Right.

I mean I corrected all.

Yeah.

that's not a problem.

I mean I hand - edited the whole the whole meeting so that can be run it's just Once we get the the bug out.

Mmm.

One one question which is I I had the impression  from this from this meeting that w that I transcribed that um that there was already automatic downsampling occurring,

Yeah. Mm - hmm.

is that I thought that in order to

Yep.

so it was so it's like there's already down

There's one level that's already happening right here.

This is being recorded at forty - eight kilohertz. Which is more that anybody needs

OK.

Right.

Oh.

And it gets downsampled to sixteen.

OK.

so

And that's actually said in your meeting,

Hmm.

Oh OK.

that's how I know that.

That's exactly, and that's how I know it.

Yeah.

I I It's like are we downsampling to sixteen?

It's a digital audio orientation for the board

Right.

Mmm.

it's in the monitor so it's

Thank God it's not more than that.

So.

Yeah.

And I have no idea what filter it's using,

Is eight kilohertz is is eighty kilohertz generally accepted as like standard for voice?

so

For telephone stuff.

Telephone.

Telephone.

Yeah that's what I was gonna say, I mean like.

So it's it's it's just that they were operating from Switchboard which was a completely telephone database

so Oh, I see, so.

and so that was a standard for that sixteen s

OK.

So sixteen seems to be pretty typical for with this sort of thing.

Sixteen is more common for for uh broadband stuff that isn't.

Right.

That isn't music.

that isn't music and isn't telephone,

And I guess if you're comparing like uh if you wanna run recognition on the PZM stuff you would want you don't want to downsample the wh that

yeah.

Why is that?

I don't know.

right? Well I don I mean if it's any better

No actually I would think that you would you would get better you'd get better high frequencies in the local mike.

All the way around I'd think.

Uh but who knows? I mean we do we we we we we wanna find all this stuff out,

Yeah well we could try it.

Yeah.

we don't know.

We're gonna have plenty of low frequency on the P Z Ms with the fans.

OK. Yeah.

Uh yeah. Yeah.

Oh yeah there was just one more thing I wanted to say which is totally unrelated to the recognition except that um well well it's sort of related but um good news also uh I got well Chuck Fillmore agreed to record meetings but he had too many people in his meetings and that's too bad cuz they're very animated and but uh Jerry also agreed so uh we're starting on on

They're less animated.

Well but he has fewer he he won't have more than eight and it's a meeting on even deeper understanding, EDU, so that sounds interesting. As a compliment to our front - end meeting

Dot EDU?

and um so that's gonna start Monday and one of the things that I was realizing is um it would be really great if anyone has any ideas on some kind of time synchronous way that people in the meeting can make a comment to the person whose gonna transcribe it or or put a push a button or something when they wanna make a note about " oh boy you should probably erase those last few " or uh " wait I want this not to be recorded now " or uh something like that s

Weren't we gonna do something with a pad at one point?

The cross pads?

Yeah, we could do it with the cross pads.

Cuz I was thinking you know if if the person who sets up the meeting isn't there and it's a group that we don't know um and this came up talking to to Jerry also that you know is there any way for them to indicate to make sure that the qu request that they have that they make explicitly get addressed somehow

Yeah.

so I don't know if anyone has ideas or you could even write down " oh it's about three twenty five and ".

Well what I was just suggesting is is we have these this cross pad just for this purpose

Yeah, and use that.

and just use that

Not a bad idea.

and if we sink it in.

That would be great.

The other thing is eh

That be great.

I don't know if you know this or if it's a question for the mail to Dan but is this thing of two eight channel boards a maximum for this setup or could we go to a third board?

I don't know. I don't know. I'll send mail to Dan and ask. I I think that it's the maximum we can do without a lot of effort because it's one board with two digital channels.

Oh it is one board.

E eight each. So it it takes two fibers in to the one board. And so w I think if we wanna do that more than that we'd have to have two boards, and then you have the synchronization issue.

But that's a question because that would if it was possible cuz it is i you know already we have a a a group of people in this room that cannot all be miked

Right.

and it's not just cuz we haven't been to the store, right it's.

What is the limit on each of those f fiber channels, is it the

Eight.

It just it's eight channels come in, does it have do with the sampling rate?

It's eight. I have no idea. But each each fiber channel has eight eight channels and there are two ch two fibers that go in to the card.

It might be a hard limitation,

So

I mean one thing is it the whole thing as I said is is all structured in terms of forty - eight kilohertz sampling so that pushes requirements up a bit

Yeah.

but

I was just wondering if if that could change.

I mean then we'd also have to get another ADD and another mixer and all that sort of stuff.

If we could drop that.

Yeah.

So I I'll send a mail to Dan and ask him.

Yeah.

OK on the uh are we done with that? So the oth topic is uh getting more mikes and different mikes, so I got a quote um We can fit we have room for one more wireless and the wireless, this unit here is three fifty three hundred fifty dollars, it I didn't realize but we also have to get a tuner the receiver the other end, that's uh four thirty um and then also

For for each?

Wow.

I mean the tuner is four thirty for each.

Yep.

Wow.

And we just need one more so so

Yeah at least w we got the good ones.

Yeah. So that's you know something like seven hundred eighty bucks for one more of these.

Yeah. OK.

Um and then also um It turns out that the connector that this thing uses is proprietary of Sony

Oh.

believe it or not and Sony only sells this headset.

Mmm.

So if we wanna use a different set headset the solution that the guy suggested and they apparently lots of people have done is Sony will sell you the jack with just wires coming out the end and then you can buy a headset that has pigtail and solder it yourself. And that's the other solution and so the jacks are forty bucks apiece and the he recommended um a crown CM three eleven AE headset for two hundred bucks apiece.

There isn't this some sort of thing that plugs in, you actually have to go and do the soldering yourself?

Becau - the reason is the only only thing you can get that will plug into this is this mike or just the connector.

No I understand. The reason I ask is these sort of handmade uh wiring jobs fall apart in use so the other thing is to see if we can uh get them to do a custom job and put it together for this.

Oh I'm sure they would, they would just charge us,

Well, and they'd probably want quantity too,

so.

Well

they'd

no they'll just charge us more, so it's this

Mmm.

So so my question is should we go ahead and get na nine identical head - mounted crown mikes?

Not before having one come here and have some people try it out.

OK.

Because there's no point in doing that if it's not gonna be any better.

So why don't we get one of these with the crown with a different headset?

Yeah.

And and see if that works.

And see if it's preferable and if it is then we'll get more.

Comfort.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cuz I mean I think the microphones are OK it's just the the

Right, it's just they're not comfortable to wear.

Right.

Could make our own handbands and

Um, and he said they don't have any of these in stock but they have them in LA and so it will take about a week to get here.

Yeah well it's.

Um so OK to just go order?

We're in this for the long term, yeah. Just order it.

OK

It's a lot of money for a handband.

and who is the contact if I wanna do an invoice

Yeah.

cuz I think that's how we did it before.

Uh we'll do this off - line, yeah.

It's a long time to get from LA.

OK. And then nine channels is the maximum we can do, so.

Uh y right cuz so one is for the daisy chain so that's fifteen instead of sixteen

Without getting more stuff.

and there's six on the table so that's nine.

Right.

Can I ask a really dumb question?

Yeah.

Is is there any way we can have you know like a a wireless microphone that you pass around to the people who you know the extra people for the times they wanna talk that.

Probably.

That's a good idea.

I mean.

That's not a dumb question, it's a good idea,

Well I mean.

Like uh like you know Jerry Springer thing,

yeah.

I'm just not sure how we would handle that in the

That's like the Conch.

Well but.

Like at conferences

you know r

well but there might be a way to say that there are gonna be these different people

See, look.

um and I don't know identifying somehow?

so nail the chairs down.

Yeah.

Yeah, somehow.

You know I was just thinking of Jerry Springer.

It's not a bad idea.

No that no no

that's a very if we can't get another board and even if we can I have a feeling they'll be some work.

The Springer mike.

I mean for the few times that you might wanna have that.

Let's figure that we have eight which are set up and then there's a ninth which is passed around to.

A hand - held, yeah.

that's a good idea

Infinite expansion.

Right. Kind of rules out overlap but but uh

Well or also for you know if people are not

Yeah.

Well we could just hand around the lapel.

Uh no no that's.

Rather than get a.

No not the lapel.

do you want a handset?

No.

Well I mean is the is the hand - held really any better?

Liz hates the lapel.

Yes.

I don't know

OK.

but I d I know the lapel is really suboptimal.

No it no it depends on the hand - held

Is awful?

but hand many hand - helds are built wi with sort of uh anti - shock sort of things so that it it is less uh susceptible to hand noises. If you hold the lapel mike i you just get all k sorts of junk.

Mm - hmm.

Right. I mean the ones they really pass around must be sort of OK.

OK.

so

So I wonder if they have one that will hook up.

Yeah. They have What?

I wonder if they have one that will hook up to this or whether again we'll have to wire it ourselves.

Well, you wouldn't want it to hook there you'd just want it to hook into the receiver in the other room, right?

No that's uh you need a transmitter.

What?

Is th isn't that built into the mike?

Oh I see. Get a get a different radio, yeah.

Yeah just these ones that they pass around with no you know wireless

Yeah. But you need a ra but it has to correspond to the receiver.

Have a little antenna coming out the bottom.

It's gonna be much easier to get one of these and just plug in a mike, isn't it?

But then the mike has to h

Do you have to hand it around and if you have two pieces of

No no.

Right.

Yeah.

so right, so this is a good point, so yeah you have these these mikes with a little antenna on the end right?

OK. And do you think you would be able to use the same receiver?

I don't know. You'll have to check with them,

OK I'll I'll ask.

yeah. But that's that's a great idea

It's just a frequency.

Yeah.

and then just sort of have that as the and then you can have groups of twenty people or whatever and and uh

Yeah because there's only I mean as Andreas pointed out actually I think in the large the larger the group the less interaction the less people are talking um over each other.

Pretty soon.

Mmm, yeah.

it just there might be a lot of people that speak once or twice and

Right.

Um Gotta go.

Off you go, yeah.

OK so I guess people who have to leave can leave and do we have anything else to discuss or should we just do digits?

I I thought of some extra a couple of extra things I'd like to mention.

OK.

One of them is to give you a status in terms of the transcriptions so far. So um as of last night um I'd assigned twelve hours and they'd finished nine

uh Yep,

and my goal was to have eleven done by the end of the month, I think that by tomorrow we'll have ten.

Uh it's great.

Pretty close,

So they're still working.

that's good.

I j and this I got this email from Jane at like two in the morning or something

Wow.

that's good.

so it's really great

It's working out, thanks.

It's really great.

Thanks. And then um also an idea for another meeting, which would be to have the transcribers talk about the data It's sort of a a little bit a little bit

That's a great idea.

Super idea.

Yep, that'd be very interesting.

That's a great idea cuz I'd like to g have it recorded so that we can remember all the little things,

Yeah.

I'd love to hear what they have to say.

Yeah.

that's a great idea.

So if we got them to talk about this meeting, it would be a meta meta meeting.

Yeah. Yeah, exa exactly I guess nested several layers,

Now you have eight transcribers and there's ten of us

but

so how do we do this, is the only thing.

Or just have them talk amongst themselves.

Have them have their own meeting.

And have

Well that's what I'm thinking,

Oh.

yeah. Have them talk about the data and they and they've made observations to me

that would be great.

like they say uh you know this meeting that we think has so much overlap, in fact it does but there are other groups of similar size that have very little, you know it's part of it's it's the norm of the group and all that and they have various observations that would be fun, I think.

That's a great idea.

Yeah, I'd like to hear what they s say.

Yeah.

Be great.

So maybe we could they could have a meeting more or less without us that to do this and we should record it

OK.

and then maybe one or two of them could come to one of these meetings and and could you know could tell us about it.

Yeah.

Give us a status.

Yeah.

Oh good. OK.

Yeah.

It's they will get to transcribe their own meeting but they also get paid for having a break

That would be weird.

What what yeah that's right.

and I think that's a good idea,

Yeah exactly, yeah.

Yeah.

get them involved.

Great.

Um that's a great idea.

Great.

Super.

I'm really sorry I have to g no I have to go as well.

OK.

And then I wanted to also um say something about the Fiscus uh uh John John Fiscus visit tomorrow. And Which is to say that w it'll be from nine to one that I'm going to uh uh offer the organization allow him to uh adjust it if he wishes but to be basically in three parts, the acoustic part coming first which would be basically the room engineering aspects um other things and he'll be also presenting what NIST is doing and and uh then uh number two would be sort of a the the transcription process so this would be a focus on like presegmentation and the modifications to the the multitrans interface which allows more refined encoding of the beginnings and ends of the overlapping segments which uh Dave Gelbart's been doing and then um uh and of course the presegmentation Thilo's been doing and then um the third part would and again he has some stuff that's i relevant with respect to NIST and then the third one would be focus on transcription standards so at NIST he's interested in this establishment of a global encoding standard I guess I would say and I want it, you know k yeah see what they're doing and also present what what we've chosen as ours and and discuss that kind of thing. And so but he's only here until until one and actually we're thinking of noon being uh lunch time so basically hoping that we can get as much of this done as possible before noon. S

OK.

And everybody who wants to attend is welcome. So

Oh, where you're gonna meet?

yeah. Here mostly but I've also reserved the BARCO room um eh to figure out how that works in terms of like maybe having a live demonstration.

OK but the nine o' cl nine o' clock will be i be in here. Yeah, OK.

Yeah. Mm - hmm.

I assume we're not gonna try to record it?

Oh I think that would be hard, yeah.

Yeah, I think just adds.

Alright.

Yeah.

Um good.

Thank you though, uh - huh.

So maybe do digits and recess?

Unless there's anything else?

Yeah. Yeah.

Do digital ones?

Uh OK.

Yeah.

Uh should y we make him wear Andreas' mike or would that just be too confusing?

Yeah. No I don't think it's confusing. Well, it doesn't confuse me.

When we do this in the key in the key in the key it has to indicate that channel change,

Does it mess up the forms?

right?

Uh yeah I just don't know how we would do that, so. I mean other than free free form.

Well i have a time mark.

The on switch is here on the on the top there.

Yeah.

OK.

And just clip it to your collar.

That's fine.

OK, my name is uh Espen Eriksen. I'm a Norwegian. Um uh this is my second semester at Berkeley. Currently I'm taking uh my first graduate level courses in DSP and um when I come back to Norway I'm gonna continue with the more of a research project work kind of work. So this semester I'm starting up with a with a small project through uh Dave Gelbart which I'm taking a course with I got in touch with him and he told me about this project. So with the help of uh Dan Ellis I'm gonna do small project associated to this. What I'm gonna try to do is uh use use ech echo cancellation to uh to handle the periods where you have overlapping talk. To try to do something about that. So currently I'm um I'm just reading up on echo cancellation, s looking into the theory behind that and then uh hopefully I get some results. So it it's a it's a project goes over the course of one semester.

Great.

So I'm just here today to introduce myself. Tell about I'll be I'll be working on this.

And are you staying at Berkeley or is are you just here a semester?

This is my second semester and last.

Ah second and last,

Yeah.

OK.

So I leave

He's in the he's in the cour two two five D course.

Yeah, I'm in Morgan's course,

So, yeah.

yeah.

Good.

Welcome.

Then you then you go back to Norway, that's OK.

Yeah.

We were just talking about something like this yesterday or yeah yesterday with Liz. About doing some of the echo cancellation stuff or possibly the spectroanalysis over the overlaps, so. Cool.

Yeah.

OK,

Digits?

let's do digits. OK.

And stop.

Question: What decisions were made during the meeting?

Response:
There were no decisions made during the meeting. The participants discussed potential actions such as:
* Implement adaptation.
* Use a different language model.
* Downsample the audio to 16 kHz instead of 8 kHz.

Question: Were the microphones used during the meeting wireless?

Response:
The participants discussed potential uses for the wireless microphones and decided to:
* Purchase nine more wireless microphones.
* Purchase nine Crown CM311AE headsets to improve the comfort of the wireless microphones.

Question: What was decided regarding downsampling audio?

Response:
The participants discussed potential uses for downsampling the audio and decided to:

* Downsample the audio to 16 kHz instead of 8 kHz.
* Try using the original wave forms, but not downsample them, and compare the results with the downsampled wave forms.

Question: Was it decided to stop using wireless microphones at the meetings?

Response: No, the participants decided to purchase more wireless microphones and headsets to improve their comfort.

Question: What was decided regarding the speaker identification process?

Response: The participants decided to have a new speaker form, which is to be filled out once, but everyone does need to do it to tell their name, sex, email, et cetera.

Question: Why did the participants decide to downsample the audio to 16 kHz instead of 8 kHz?

Response: The meeting participants did not decide to downsample the audio to 16 kHz instead of 8 kHz. They discussed the potential uses of downsampling the audio and decided to try using the original wave forms, but not downsample them, and compare the results with the downsampled wave forms.

Question: What did they decide to do with the original wave forms?

Response:
The participants discussed the potential uses of downsampling the audio and decided to:

* Try using the original wave forms, but not downsample them.
* Compare the results of using downsampled waveforms with the results of using the original waveforms.

Question: Did the participants decide to replace the 28 channel boards with 32 channel boards?

Response: The meeting participants did not discuss replacing the 28 channel boards with 32 channel boards.

Question: Can you summarize the key points of the meeting?

Response:
* The participants discussed potential uses for the wireless microphones, downsampling the audio, and the speaker identification process.
* They decided to purchase more wireless microphones and headsets, try using the original wave forms instead of downsampling them, and have the transcribers discuss the data.

Question: Besides the wireless microphones and headsets, what other improvements were decided upon for the microphones?

Response: The meeting participants did not discuss any other improvements for the microphones besides the wireless microphones and headsets.