ASRbased subtitling of live TV-programs for the hearing impaired

A system for on-line generation of closed captions (subtitles) for broadcast of live TV-programs is described. During broadcast, a commentator formulates a possibly condensed, but semantically correct version of the original speech. These compressed phrases are recognized by a continuous speech recognizer, and the resulting captions are fed into the teletext system. This application will provide the hearing impaired with an option to read captions for live broadcast programs, i.e., when off-line captioning is not feasible. The main advantage in using a speech recognizer rather than a stenography-based system (e.g., Velotype) is the relaxed requirements for commentator training. Also, the amount of text generated by a system based on stenography tends to be large, thus making it harder to read. 1