professor b: , so . if we ca n't , we ca n't . but we 're gon na try to make this an abbreviated meeting cuz the next occupants were pushing for it , so . so . agenda is according to this , is transcription status , darpa demos xml tools , disks , backups , et cetera and professor b: ok . should we just go in order ? transcription status ? who 's that 's probably you . postdoc a: do that quickly . i hired several more transcribers , they 're making great progress . postdoc a: seve - several , several . and and , i ' ve been finishing up the double checking . i hoped to have had that done by today but it 's gon na take one more week . grad h: as a somewhat segue into the next topic , could i get a hold of the data even if it 's not really corrected yet just so get the data formats and make the information retrieval is working ? grad h: so i 'll probably just make some copies of those rather than use the ones that are there . grad h: and then just we 'll have to remember to delete them once the corrections are made . phd d: i also got anot a short remark to the transcription . i ' ve just processed the first five edu meetings and they are chunked up so they would they probably can be sent to ibm whenever they want them . phd f: and we get the transcript back and we find out that hopefully there are no problems matching up the transcript with what we gave them , then we 'll be ready to go and we 'll just send them the next four as a big batch , and let them work on that . grad h: and so we 're doing those as disjoint from the ones we 're transcribing here ? phd f: we 're doing things in parallel , that way we can get as much done a at once . grad h: , that 's the right way to do it , especially for the information retrieval . anything else on transcription status ? grad h: right , which so i ' ve been working on using the thisl tools to do information retrieval on meeting data and the thisl tools are there 're two sets , there 's a back - end and a front - end , so the front - end is the user interface and the back - end is the indexing tool and the querying tool . and so i ' ve written some tools to convert everything into the right for file formats . and the command line version of the indexing and the querying is now working . so at least on the one meeting that i had the transcript for conveniently you can now do information retrieval on it , do type in a string and get back a list of start - end times for the meeting , grad h: right ? and so and then it munges it to pass it to the thisl ir which uses an sgml - like format for everything . professor b: and then does it play something back or that 's something you 're having to program ? grad h: , right now , i have a tool that will do that on a command line using our standard tools , but my intention is to do a prettier user interface based either so so that 's the other thing i wanted to discuss , is what should we do for the user interface ? we have two tools that have already been written . the softsound guys did a web - based one , grad h: , which i have n't used , have n't looked at . dan says it 's pretty good but it does mean you need to be running a web server . and so it 's pretty big and complex . and it would be difficult to port to windows because it means porting the web server to windows . the other option is dan did the tcl - tk thisl gui front - end for broadcast news which looks great . that 's a demo . and that would be much easier to port to windows . and so that 's the way we should go . postdoc a: i can i ask a question ? so as it stands within the channeltrans interface , it 's possible to do a find and a play . postdoc a: you can find a searched string and play . so e are you so you 're adding like , i , are they fuzzy matches or are they ? grad h: it 's a standard , text - retrieval - based so it 's term frequency , inverse document frequency scoring . and then there are all sorts of metrics for spacing how far apart they have to be and things like that . so it 's grad h: i it 's like doing a google query or anyth anything else like that . so i it uses so it pr produces an index ahead of time so you do n't you 're not doing a linear search through all the documents . cuz you can imagine if with if we have the sixty hours ' worth you do would n't wanna do a search . you have to do preindexing and so that these tools do all that . and so the work to get the front - end to work would be porting it to get it to work on the unix systems , our side is just rewriting them and modifying them to work for meetings . so that it understands that they 're different speakers and that it 's one big audio file instead of a bunch of little ones and just sorta things like that . grad h: the thisl gui tool which is the one that dan wrote , tcl - tk you type in a query and then you get back a list of hits and you can type on them and listen to them . click on them rather with a mouse . phd f: get back a something that would let you click and listen to some audio where that phrase had occurred professor b: that was a really good look . it 's too bad that could n't come into the postdoc a: at some point we 're gon na have to say what that private joke is , that keeps coming up . professor b: and then again , maybe not . so , that soun that sounds reasonable . , it loo it my recollection of it is it 's a pretty reasonable demo format . grad h: and then we 'd wanna add things like query by speaker and by meeting and all that . dave gelbart expressed some interest in working on that so i 'll work with him on it . and it 's looking pretty good , the fact that i got the query system working . so if we wanna just do a video - based one that 'll be easy . if we wanna get it to windows it 's gon na be a little more work because the thisl ir , the information retrieval tool 's , i had difficulty just compiling them on solaris . so getting them to compile on windows might be challenging . phd f: but you were saying that the that there 's that set of tools , cygnus tools , that grad h: , without those i would n't even attempt it . but what those they what those do is provide a bsd compatibility layer , so that the normal unix function calls all work . grad h: , but the problem is that the thisl tools did n't use anything like autoconf and so you have the normal porting problems of different header files and th some things are defined and some things are n't and different compiler work - arounds and so on . so the fact that it took me a day to get it c to compile under solaris means it 's probably gon na take me s significantly more than that to get it to compile under windows . phd e: all you need to do is say to dan " gee it would be if this worked under autoconf " and it 'll be done in a day . professor b: but it would what would serve both purposes , is if you contact him and ask him if he 's already done it . professor b: if he has then you learn , if he has n't then he 'll do it . grad h: that 's right . so , and i ' ve been corresponding with dan and also with , softsound guy , grad h: my brain is not working , i do n't remember who i ' ve been corresponding with . grad h: so just getting documentation and f and formats , so that 's all going pretty , grad h: we 'll be ok with that . we have , that 's a good point too . phd e: why do n't you try and merge transcriber and thisl ir ? they 're both tcl interfaces . grad h: this is one of the reasons this is the one of the reasons that i ' m gon na have dave gelbart having him volunteer to work on it is a really good thing because he 's worked on the transcriber and he 's more familiar with tcl - tk than i am . phd e: right . but that the transcriber uses snack and then you can but you can use a lot of the same functionality and it 's grad h: , , thisl gui probably uses snack . and so my intention was just to base it on that . phd e: my thought was is that it would be to have the running transcripts , from speaker to speaker . grad h: right , we 'll have to figure out a user interface for that , so . phd e: right . that my thought was if you had like multitrans or whatever do it . or whatever . grad h: it might be fairly difficult to get that to work in the little short segments we 'd be talking about and having the search tools and so on . we we can look into it , but professor b: the thing i was asking about with , free bsd is that it might be easier to get powerpoint shows running in free bsd than to get this other package running in grad h: , we have to i have to sit down and try it before i make too many judgments , so my experience with the gnu compatibility library is really it 's just as hard and just as easy to port to any system . right ? the windows system is n't any harder because it looks like a bsd system . it 's just , just like all of them , the " include " files are a little different and the function calls are a little different . grad h: so i it might be a little easier but it 's not gon na be a lot easier . professor b: so there was that demo , which was one of the main ones , then we talked about some other which would be showing off the transcriber interface itself and as you say , maybe we could even merge those in some sense , but , and part of that was showing off what the speech - non nonspeech that thilo has done s looks like . postdoc a: can i ask one more thing about thisl ? so with the ir then you end up with a somewhat prioritized ? phd g: so another idea i w t had just now actually for the demo was whether it might be of interest to sh to show some of the prosody work that don 's been doing . actually show some of the features and then show a task like finding sentence boundaries or finding turn boundaries . , you can show that graphically , what the features are doing . it , it does n't work great but it 's definitely giving us something . professor b: cuz i ' m gon na want to talk about it and so i if there 's something that shows it graphically it 's much better than me just having a bullet point pointing at something i much about , grad c: i ' m starting to and we can probably find some examples of different type of prosodic events going on . professor b: s so when we here were having this demo meeting , what we 're coming up with is that we wanna have all these pieces together , to first order , by the end of the month phd g: , the end of this month or next month ? , you mean like today ? professor b: that 'll give us a week or so to port things over to my laptop and make that works , phd g: if d if don can talk to whoever 's cuz we 're doing this anyway as part of our , the research , visualizing what these features are doing and so either it might not be integrated but it could potentially be in it . professor b: so , to let s the goal is to let them it is we 're doing . phd g: i do n't think anyone has done this on meeting data so it might be neat , . grad h: so i ' ve been doing a bunch of xml tools where you we 're moving to xml as the general format for everything and that 's definitely the right way to go because there are a lot of tools that let you do extraction and reformatting of xml tools . so yet again we should probably meet to talk about transcription formats in xml because i ' m not particularly happy with what we have now . it works with transcriber but it 's a pain to use it in other tools because it does n't mark start and end . grad h: so it 's implicit in there but you have to do a lot of processing to get it . grad h: and so and also i 'd like to do the indirect time line business . but regardless , w that 's something that you , me , and jane can talk about later . , but i ' ve installed xml tools of various sorts in various languages and so if people are interested in doing extracting any information from any of these files , either information on users because the user database is that way i ' m converting the key files to xml so that you can extract m various inf sorted information on individual meetings and then also the transcripts . and so l just let me know there it 's mostly java and perl but we can get other languages too if that 's desirable . phd g: , quick question on that . is do we have the seat information ? in in the key files now ? phd g: never mind . i ' m just trying to figure out , when morgan 's voice appears on someone 's microphone are they next to him or are they across from him ? phd g: they 're on th right , these , but had n't ever been putting it in the key files . grad h: this is why i wanna use a g a tool to do it rather than the plain text because with the plain text it 's very easy to skip those things . if you use the edit - key , or key - edit grad h: it has it in there , a place to fill it in . , and so if you do n't fill it in , you 're not gon na get it in the meetings . grad h: and then the other thing also that thilo noticed is , on the microphone , on channel zero it says hand - held mike or crown mike , you actually have to say which one . phd g: and i was looking at chuck 's , like , " what did chuck do , ok i 'll do that " . so . grad h: and then also in a couple of places instead of filling the participants under " participants " they were filled in under " description " . and so that 's also a problem . so anyway . grad h: that 's it . also i ' m working on another version of this tool , the one that shows up here , that will flash yellow if the mike is n't connected . and it 's not quite ready to go yet because it 's hard to tell whether the mike 's connected or not because the best quality ones , the crown ones , are about the same level if they 're off and no one 's o off or if they 're on and no one 's talking . these ones , they are much easier , there 's a bigger difference . so i ' m working on that and it sorta works and so eventually we will change to that and then you 'll be able to see graphically if your mike is dropping in or out . grad c: will that also include like batteries dying ? just a any time the mike 's putting out zeros . grad h: the other thing is as i ' ve said before , it is actually on the thing . there 's a little level meter but no one ever pays attention to it . so having it on the screen is more easy to notice . grad h: ok , disk backup , et cetera ? i spoke with dave johnson about putting all the meeting recorder on non - backed - up disk to save the overhead of backup and he said " , you could do that if you want " but he thought it was a bad idea . what he said is doing the manual one , doing nw archive to copy it is a good idea and we should do that and have it backed up . he w he 's a firm believer in lots of different modalities of backup . , his point was taken . this data can not be recovered . and so if a mistake is made and we lose the backup we should have the archive and if then a mistake is made and we lose the archive we should have the backup . professor b: i it is true that even with something that 's backed up it 's not gon na if it 's stationary it 's not going to go through the increment it 's not gon na burden things in the incremental backups . grad h: . but he said that we sh should n't worry too much about that , that we 're getting a new backup system and we 're far enough away from saturation on full backups that it 's w probably ok . grad h: and , so the only issue here is the timing between getting more disks and recording meetings . professor b: so i the idea is that we would be reserving the non - backed - up space for things that took less than twenty - four hours to recreate like that , right ? grad h: things that are recreatable easily and also , things that are recreatable . the expanded files and things like that . they take up a lot more room anyway . but we do need more disk . grad h: and i agree with him . his point was taken that if we lose one of these we can not get it back . i do n't think there was any other et cetera there . grad h: unfortunately we could burn c ds but first of all it 's a pain . because you have to copy it down to the pc and then burn it and that 's a multi - step procedure . and second of all the write - once burners as opposed to a professional press do n't last . so burning them for distribution is fine but burning them for backup is not a good idea . postdoc a: i do have it 's a different topic . can i add one top topic ? we have time ? i wanted to ask , i know that thilo you were , bringing the channeltrans interface onto the windows machine ? and i wanted to know is th phd d: it , it was just a problem with the snack version and the transcriber version but it 's solved . postdoc a: maybe i should know this but i do n't . does this mean that the that this could be por ported to a think - pad note or some other type of grad h: got an email from james landay who said " if you 're not using them , could you return them ? " so he said he does n't need them , he just periodically w at the end of each term sends out email to everyone who was recorded as having them and asks them if they 're still using them . grad h: my opinion on it is , first , i never take notes anyway so i ' m not gon na use it , and second , it 's another level of infrastructure that we have to deal with . postdoc a: and i have so my feeling on it is that in principle it 's a really idea , and you have the time tags which makes it better tha than just taking ra raw notes . on the other hand , i the down side for me was that the pen is really noisy . so you have ka kaplunk , kaplunk . and i and i if it 's audible on the but that was a disadvantage . i do take notes , i could be taking notes on these things and i the plus with the crosspads would be the time markings but i . professor b: so it 's it 's a regular pad , just a regular pad of paper but there 's this pen which indicates position . and so you have time and position stored professor b: so that you can you have a record of whatever it is you ' ve written . grad h: and then you can download it and they have ocr and searching and all sorts of things . so i if you take notes it 's a great little device . professor b: and one of the reasons that it was brought up originally was because we were interested in higher - level things , professor b: not just the , microphone but also summarization and the question is if you were going to go to some gold standard of what wa what was it that happened in the meeting , where would it come from ? and that was one of the things , and so the it seemed like a neat idea . we 'll have a , have a scribe , have somebody take good notes and then that 's part of the record of the meeting . and then we did it once or twice and we postdoc a: i did it one time u but i the other thing i ' m thinking is if we wanted that thing i wonder if we 'd lose that much by having someone be a scribe by listening to the tape , to the recording afterwards and taking notes in some other interface . phd g: the , what if you 're sitting there and you just wanna make an x and you do n't wanna take notes and you 're you just wanna phd g: get the summary of the transcript from this time location like , and then while you 're bored you do n't do anything and once in a while , maybe there 's a joke and you put a x and but in other words you can use that just to highlight times in a very simple way . also with i was thinking and i know morgan disagrees with me on this but suppose you have a group in here and you wanna let them note whenever they think there might be something later that they might not wanna distribute in terms of content , they could just make an x near that point or a question mark that alerts them that when they get the transcript back they c could get some red flags in that transcript region and they can then look at it . i know we have n't been using it but i w imagine it being useful just for marking time periods which you then get back in a transcript professor b: i so , what makes one is maybe we should actually schedule some periods where people go over something later professor b: and put some summary , some there 'd be some scribe who would actually listen , w who 'd to actually listen to the whole thing , not transcribe it , but just write down things that struck them as important . but then you do n't have the time reference that you 'd have if you had it live . phd f: how do you synchronize the time in the crosspad and the time of the recording ? grad h: that was one of the issues we talked about originally and that 's w part of the difficulty is that we need an infrastructure for using the time the crosspads and so that means synchronizing the time you want it pretty close and there 's a fair amount of skew because it 's a hand - held unit with a battery grad h: and so you have to synchronize at the beginning of each meeting all the pads that are being used , so that it 's synchronized with the time on that and then you have to download to an application , and then you have to figure out what the data formats are and convert it over if you wanna do anything with this information . postdoc a: there is an alternative , it 's still , there 's , your point stands about there be needing to be an infrastructure , but it does n't have to be synchronized with the little clock 's timer on it . you c , i when i did it i synchronized it by voice , by whispering " one , two , three , four " onto the microphone and , . grad h: , but then there 's the infrastructure at the other end which someone has to listen to that and find that point , phd g: , could we keep one of these things for another year ? would h is there a big cau phd g: even maybe some of the transcribers who might be wanting to annotate f just there 's a bunch of things that might be neat to do but i it might not be the case that we can actually synchronize them and then do all the infrastructure but we could at least try it out . professor b: one thing that we might try is on some set of meetings , some collection of meetings , maybe edu is the right one or maybe something else , we get somebody to buy into the idea of doing this as part of the task . , part of the reason that adam was so interested in the speechcorder f idea from the beginning is he said from the beginning he hated taking notes and so and jane is more into it i if you wanna really do this all the time so to get someone to actually buy into it and have at least some series of meetings where we do it . and if so , it 's probably worth having one . the p the problem with the more extended view , all these other with quibbling about particular applications of it is that it looks like it 's hard to get people to routinely use it , it just has n't happened anyway . but maybe if we can get a person to phd g: i do n't think it has to be part of a what everybody does in a meeting but it might be a useful , neat part of the project that we can , show off as a mechanism for synchronizing events in time that happen that you just wanna make a note of , like what jane was talking about with some later browsing , just as a convenience , even if it 's not a full - blown note taking substitute . phd e: if you wanted to do that maybe the right architecture for it is to get a pda with a wireless card . and and that way you can synchronize very easily with the meeting because you 'll be synchroni you can synchronize with the linux server and phd e: you have a pda and may and you could have the same x interface or whatever , you 'd have to do a little bit of coding to do it . but you could imagine , phd e: , if all you really wanted was you did n't want this secondary note - taking channel but just being able to use m markers of some sort , a pda with a l a wireless card would be the probably the right way to go . even buttons you could do , , as you said . grad h: for what you ' ve been describing buttons would be even more convenient than anything else , phd g: , i do n't have , grandiose ideas in mind but i ' m just thinking we ' ve we 're getting into the next year now and we have a lot of these things worked out at in terms of the speech maybe somebody will be interested in this and professor b: where like one button was " - " and then another button was " that 's great " and another button " that 's f " phd g: or like this is my " i ' m supposed to do this " button , like " i better remember to " grad h: the crosspad idea is a good one . it 's just a question of getting people to use it and getting the infrastructure set up in such a way that it 's not a lot of extra work . that 's part of the reason why it has n't happened is that it 's been a lot of extra work for me postdoc a: but it 's also , it has this problem of having to go from an analog to a d a digital record too , postdoc a: but , say , if i if you 're writing notes in it does it ca n't do handwriting recognition , right ? professor b: no , no , but it 's just storing the pixel informa position information , it 's all digital . postdoc a: i what i ' m thinking is that the pda solution you h you have it already without needing to go from the pixelization to a phd g: it also it 's maybe realistic cuz people are supposed to be bringing their p d as to the meeting eventually , right ? that 's why we have this little i what i do n't wanna more work for anyone but imagine some interesting things that you could do with it and so if we do n't have to return it and we can keep it for a year i . grad h: w we do n't we certainly do n't have to return it , as i said . all all he said is that if you 're not using it could you return it , if you are using it feel free to keep it . that we have n't used it and are we going to ? professor b: so we have no but by i would suggest you return one . because we , we have n't used it . phd g: one would probably be fine . maybe we could do like a student project , maybe someone who wants to do this as their main like s project for something would be . grad h: if we had them out and sitting on the table people might use them a little more professor b: maybe jeremy could sit in some meetings and press a button when there when somebody laughed . phd g: jeremy 's gon na be an he 's a new student starting on modeling brea breath and laughter , actually , which sounds funny but it should be , grad h: equipment . ordered , i ' m always gon na do that . w we ordered more wireless , and so they should be coming in at some point . and then at the same time i 'll probably rewire the room as per jane 's suggestion so that the first n channels are wireless , are the m the close - talking and the next n are far - field . professor b: what he means but is n't that funny sounding ? we ordered more wireless . it 's like wires are the things so you 're wiring you 're you we 're we ordered more absence of the thing . professor b: there 's all this going on between andreas and dave and chuck and others with various kinds of runs recognition runs , trying to figure things out about the features but it 's all in process , so there 's not much to say right now . why do n't we start with our esteemed guest . phd g: , i ' m just thinking , are you gon na try to save the data before this next group comes in ? , so we might wanna do it simultaneous . professor b: ok , a one and a two and a three . ok , babble , take five .
this meeting of the berkley meeting recorder group charts the progress of their project and covers ongoing issues as well as some new ones. the most pressing issue concerns the demos which the group are preparing for the darpa meeting next month. here they discuss the querying and indexing tool which is progressing well albeit with a few front-end issues , and also the transcriber tool. transcription is progressing well , with new people hired , and double checking almost complete. work is also going on in parallel with ibm. additionally , the group have progressed further with data storage issues , with backing-up their data now regarded as a priority , and more disk space required. tools for accessing key file information have been developed which should ensure all meeting information is present. the collection of crosspad note-taking data will be pursued in future meetings. finally , other progress made includes getting the channeltrans interface working , ordering more wireless microphones , and analysing recognition runs. darpa demo illustrating prosody of meeting events will be completed by the end of the ( next ) month , so as to allow a week or so for transferring data across to laptops. after consulting others , the group decide that not backing up their meeting data is a bad idea , since this cannot be recovered. therefore , meeting recorder data will be backed up , and also stored manually using the nw archive. more disk space will be purchased , however for now , data which is easily re-creatable will not be backed up. after evaluating the use of the crosspads , the group decide to return one , and also keep one which will be left out in meetings to encourage its use. use of pdas and buttons for note-taking will be investigated , along with using the data for a student research project. because of time constraints , the group decide to do simultaneous digits. improving the thisl front-end user interface may be difficult if it is to run on windows as a web server tcl-tk may need to be used instead. more information on xml transcription formats is required for the creation of the tools. information for key files , such as microphone type , seating , and participant information , is not being properly recorded , and in some cases the microphones aren't working properly. however this should be rectified by the use of appropriate xml tools. the crosspads have not been used to their full potential , which is because of a number of problems regarding their use: first , they need to be synchronised with the time of the meeting recording , and secondly , they use a non standard data format which needs converting. additionally , some people tend not to make notes in meetings. several transcribers have now been hired , and double-checking is almost finished. information retrieval will progress using uncorrected transcripts. in parallel to the transcription , the first five edu meetings are chunked and ready to go to ibm , once the ibm transcript is checked and satisfactory. for the darpa demo: tools have been written to convert everything into the correct file formats , an now the thistl back-end querying and indexing tool is now working on the command line. work is also underway to improve the front-end thistl interface. the demo of transcriber interface was discussed , and may include graphical illustration of prosodic features indicating sentence or turn boundaries. work is continuing to create tools for handling xml data , which extract data from the xml key files. tools will also be provided to ensure that appropriate meeting information is present , and that microphones and recording is working. the channeltrans interface is now working on windows machines. more wireless microphones have been ordered , and the room is to be re-wired as suggested by jane , using the wireless close-talking microphones first , and then the far-field microphones. analysis of the recognition runs to identify features and their characteristics is on-going.
###dialogue: professor b: , so . if we ca n't , we ca n't . but we 're gon na try to make this an abbreviated meeting cuz the next occupants were pushing for it , so . so . agenda is according to this , is transcription status , darpa demos xml tools , disks , backups , et cetera and professor b: ok . should we just go in order ? transcription status ? who 's that 's probably you . postdoc a: do that quickly . i hired several more transcribers , they 're making great progress . postdoc a: seve - several , several . and and , i ' ve been finishing up the double checking . i hoped to have had that done by today but it 's gon na take one more week . grad h: as a somewhat segue into the next topic , could i get a hold of the data even if it 's not really corrected yet just so get the data formats and make the information retrieval is working ? grad h: so i 'll probably just make some copies of those rather than use the ones that are there . grad h: and then just we 'll have to remember to delete them once the corrections are made . phd d: i also got anot a short remark to the transcription . i ' ve just processed the first five edu meetings and they are chunked up so they would they probably can be sent to ibm whenever they want them . phd f: and we get the transcript back and we find out that hopefully there are no problems matching up the transcript with what we gave them , then we 'll be ready to go and we 'll just send them the next four as a big batch , and let them work on that . grad h: and so we 're doing those as disjoint from the ones we 're transcribing here ? phd f: we 're doing things in parallel , that way we can get as much done a at once . grad h: , that 's the right way to do it , especially for the information retrieval . anything else on transcription status ? grad h: right , which so i ' ve been working on using the thisl tools to do information retrieval on meeting data and the thisl tools are there 're two sets , there 's a back - end and a front - end , so the front - end is the user interface and the back - end is the indexing tool and the querying tool . and so i ' ve written some tools to convert everything into the right for file formats . and the command line version of the indexing and the querying is now working . so at least on the one meeting that i had the transcript for conveniently you can now do information retrieval on it , do type in a string and get back a list of start - end times for the meeting , grad h: right ? and so and then it munges it to pass it to the thisl ir which uses an sgml - like format for everything . professor b: and then does it play something back or that 's something you 're having to program ? grad h: , right now , i have a tool that will do that on a command line using our standard tools , but my intention is to do a prettier user interface based either so so that 's the other thing i wanted to discuss , is what should we do for the user interface ? we have two tools that have already been written . the softsound guys did a web - based one , grad h: , which i have n't used , have n't looked at . dan says it 's pretty good but it does mean you need to be running a web server . and so it 's pretty big and complex . and it would be difficult to port to windows because it means porting the web server to windows . the other option is dan did the tcl - tk thisl gui front - end for broadcast news which looks great . that 's a demo . and that would be much easier to port to windows . and so that 's the way we should go . postdoc a: i can i ask a question ? so as it stands within the channeltrans interface , it 's possible to do a find and a play . postdoc a: you can find a searched string and play . so e are you so you 're adding like , i , are they fuzzy matches or are they ? grad h: it 's a standard , text - retrieval - based so it 's term frequency , inverse document frequency scoring . and then there are all sorts of metrics for spacing how far apart they have to be and things like that . so it 's grad h: i it 's like doing a google query or anyth anything else like that . so i it uses so it pr produces an index ahead of time so you do n't you 're not doing a linear search through all the documents . cuz you can imagine if with if we have the sixty hours ' worth you do would n't wanna do a search . you have to do preindexing and so that these tools do all that . and so the work to get the front - end to work would be porting it to get it to work on the unix systems , our side is just rewriting them and modifying them to work for meetings . so that it understands that they 're different speakers and that it 's one big audio file instead of a bunch of little ones and just sorta things like that . grad h: the thisl gui tool which is the one that dan wrote , tcl - tk you type in a query and then you get back a list of hits and you can type on them and listen to them . click on them rather with a mouse . phd f: get back a something that would let you click and listen to some audio where that phrase had occurred professor b: that was a really good look . it 's too bad that could n't come into the postdoc a: at some point we 're gon na have to say what that private joke is , that keeps coming up . professor b: and then again , maybe not . so , that soun that sounds reasonable . , it loo it my recollection of it is it 's a pretty reasonable demo format . grad h: and then we 'd wanna add things like query by speaker and by meeting and all that . dave gelbart expressed some interest in working on that so i 'll work with him on it . and it 's looking pretty good , the fact that i got the query system working . so if we wanna just do a video - based one that 'll be easy . if we wanna get it to windows it 's gon na be a little more work because the thisl ir , the information retrieval tool 's , i had difficulty just compiling them on solaris . so getting them to compile on windows might be challenging . phd f: but you were saying that the that there 's that set of tools , cygnus tools , that grad h: , without those i would n't even attempt it . but what those they what those do is provide a bsd compatibility layer , so that the normal unix function calls all work . grad h: , but the problem is that the thisl tools did n't use anything like autoconf and so you have the normal porting problems of different header files and th some things are defined and some things are n't and different compiler work - arounds and so on . so the fact that it took me a day to get it c to compile under solaris means it 's probably gon na take me s significantly more than that to get it to compile under windows . phd e: all you need to do is say to dan " gee it would be if this worked under autoconf " and it 'll be done in a day . professor b: but it would what would serve both purposes , is if you contact him and ask him if he 's already done it . professor b: if he has then you learn , if he has n't then he 'll do it . grad h: that 's right . so , and i ' ve been corresponding with dan and also with , softsound guy , grad h: my brain is not working , i do n't remember who i ' ve been corresponding with . grad h: so just getting documentation and f and formats , so that 's all going pretty , grad h: we 'll be ok with that . we have , that 's a good point too . phd e: why do n't you try and merge transcriber and thisl ir ? they 're both tcl interfaces . grad h: this is one of the reasons this is the one of the reasons that i ' m gon na have dave gelbart having him volunteer to work on it is a really good thing because he 's worked on the transcriber and he 's more familiar with tcl - tk than i am . phd e: right . but that the transcriber uses snack and then you can but you can use a lot of the same functionality and it 's grad h: , , thisl gui probably uses snack . and so my intention was just to base it on that . phd e: my thought was is that it would be to have the running transcripts , from speaker to speaker . grad h: right , we 'll have to figure out a user interface for that , so . phd e: right . that my thought was if you had like multitrans or whatever do it . or whatever . grad h: it might be fairly difficult to get that to work in the little short segments we 'd be talking about and having the search tools and so on . we we can look into it , but professor b: the thing i was asking about with , free bsd is that it might be easier to get powerpoint shows running in free bsd than to get this other package running in grad h: , we have to i have to sit down and try it before i make too many judgments , so my experience with the gnu compatibility library is really it 's just as hard and just as easy to port to any system . right ? the windows system is n't any harder because it looks like a bsd system . it 's just , just like all of them , the " include " files are a little different and the function calls are a little different . grad h: so i it might be a little easier but it 's not gon na be a lot easier . professor b: so there was that demo , which was one of the main ones , then we talked about some other which would be showing off the transcriber interface itself and as you say , maybe we could even merge those in some sense , but , and part of that was showing off what the speech - non nonspeech that thilo has done s looks like . postdoc a: can i ask one more thing about thisl ? so with the ir then you end up with a somewhat prioritized ? phd g: so another idea i w t had just now actually for the demo was whether it might be of interest to sh to show some of the prosody work that don 's been doing . actually show some of the features and then show a task like finding sentence boundaries or finding turn boundaries . , you can show that graphically , what the features are doing . it , it does n't work great but it 's definitely giving us something . professor b: cuz i ' m gon na want to talk about it and so i if there 's something that shows it graphically it 's much better than me just having a bullet point pointing at something i much about , grad c: i ' m starting to and we can probably find some examples of different type of prosodic events going on . professor b: s so when we here were having this demo meeting , what we 're coming up with is that we wanna have all these pieces together , to first order , by the end of the month phd g: , the end of this month or next month ? , you mean like today ? professor b: that 'll give us a week or so to port things over to my laptop and make that works , phd g: if d if don can talk to whoever 's cuz we 're doing this anyway as part of our , the research , visualizing what these features are doing and so either it might not be integrated but it could potentially be in it . professor b: so , to let s the goal is to let them it is we 're doing . phd g: i do n't think anyone has done this on meeting data so it might be neat , . grad h: so i ' ve been doing a bunch of xml tools where you we 're moving to xml as the general format for everything and that 's definitely the right way to go because there are a lot of tools that let you do extraction and reformatting of xml tools . so yet again we should probably meet to talk about transcription formats in xml because i ' m not particularly happy with what we have now . it works with transcriber but it 's a pain to use it in other tools because it does n't mark start and end . grad h: so it 's implicit in there but you have to do a lot of processing to get it . grad h: and so and also i 'd like to do the indirect time line business . but regardless , w that 's something that you , me , and jane can talk about later . , but i ' ve installed xml tools of various sorts in various languages and so if people are interested in doing extracting any information from any of these files , either information on users because the user database is that way i ' m converting the key files to xml so that you can extract m various inf sorted information on individual meetings and then also the transcripts . and so l just let me know there it 's mostly java and perl but we can get other languages too if that 's desirable . phd g: , quick question on that . is do we have the seat information ? in in the key files now ? phd g: never mind . i ' m just trying to figure out , when morgan 's voice appears on someone 's microphone are they next to him or are they across from him ? phd g: they 're on th right , these , but had n't ever been putting it in the key files . grad h: this is why i wanna use a g a tool to do it rather than the plain text because with the plain text it 's very easy to skip those things . if you use the edit - key , or key - edit grad h: it has it in there , a place to fill it in . , and so if you do n't fill it in , you 're not gon na get it in the meetings . grad h: and then the other thing also that thilo noticed is , on the microphone , on channel zero it says hand - held mike or crown mike , you actually have to say which one . phd g: and i was looking at chuck 's , like , " what did chuck do , ok i 'll do that " . so . grad h: and then also in a couple of places instead of filling the participants under " participants " they were filled in under " description " . and so that 's also a problem . so anyway . grad h: that 's it . also i ' m working on another version of this tool , the one that shows up here , that will flash yellow if the mike is n't connected . and it 's not quite ready to go yet because it 's hard to tell whether the mike 's connected or not because the best quality ones , the crown ones , are about the same level if they 're off and no one 's o off or if they 're on and no one 's talking . these ones , they are much easier , there 's a bigger difference . so i ' m working on that and it sorta works and so eventually we will change to that and then you 'll be able to see graphically if your mike is dropping in or out . grad c: will that also include like batteries dying ? just a any time the mike 's putting out zeros . grad h: the other thing is as i ' ve said before , it is actually on the thing . there 's a little level meter but no one ever pays attention to it . so having it on the screen is more easy to notice . grad h: ok , disk backup , et cetera ? i spoke with dave johnson about putting all the meeting recorder on non - backed - up disk to save the overhead of backup and he said " , you could do that if you want " but he thought it was a bad idea . what he said is doing the manual one , doing nw archive to copy it is a good idea and we should do that and have it backed up . he w he 's a firm believer in lots of different modalities of backup . , his point was taken . this data can not be recovered . and so if a mistake is made and we lose the backup we should have the archive and if then a mistake is made and we lose the archive we should have the backup . professor b: i it is true that even with something that 's backed up it 's not gon na if it 's stationary it 's not going to go through the increment it 's not gon na burden things in the incremental backups . grad h: . but he said that we sh should n't worry too much about that , that we 're getting a new backup system and we 're far enough away from saturation on full backups that it 's w probably ok . grad h: and , so the only issue here is the timing between getting more disks and recording meetings . professor b: so i the idea is that we would be reserving the non - backed - up space for things that took less than twenty - four hours to recreate like that , right ? grad h: things that are recreatable easily and also , things that are recreatable . the expanded files and things like that . they take up a lot more room anyway . but we do need more disk . grad h: and i agree with him . his point was taken that if we lose one of these we can not get it back . i do n't think there was any other et cetera there . grad h: unfortunately we could burn c ds but first of all it 's a pain . because you have to copy it down to the pc and then burn it and that 's a multi - step procedure . and second of all the write - once burners as opposed to a professional press do n't last . so burning them for distribution is fine but burning them for backup is not a good idea . postdoc a: i do have it 's a different topic . can i add one top topic ? we have time ? i wanted to ask , i know that thilo you were , bringing the channeltrans interface onto the windows machine ? and i wanted to know is th phd d: it , it was just a problem with the snack version and the transcriber version but it 's solved . postdoc a: maybe i should know this but i do n't . does this mean that the that this could be por ported to a think - pad note or some other type of grad h: got an email from james landay who said " if you 're not using them , could you return them ? " so he said he does n't need them , he just periodically w at the end of each term sends out email to everyone who was recorded as having them and asks them if they 're still using them . grad h: my opinion on it is , first , i never take notes anyway so i ' m not gon na use it , and second , it 's another level of infrastructure that we have to deal with . postdoc a: and i have so my feeling on it is that in principle it 's a really idea , and you have the time tags which makes it better tha than just taking ra raw notes . on the other hand , i the down side for me was that the pen is really noisy . so you have ka kaplunk , kaplunk . and i and i if it 's audible on the but that was a disadvantage . i do take notes , i could be taking notes on these things and i the plus with the crosspads would be the time markings but i . professor b: so it 's it 's a regular pad , just a regular pad of paper but there 's this pen which indicates position . and so you have time and position stored professor b: so that you can you have a record of whatever it is you ' ve written . grad h: and then you can download it and they have ocr and searching and all sorts of things . so i if you take notes it 's a great little device . professor b: and one of the reasons that it was brought up originally was because we were interested in higher - level things , professor b: not just the , microphone but also summarization and the question is if you were going to go to some gold standard of what wa what was it that happened in the meeting , where would it come from ? and that was one of the things , and so the it seemed like a neat idea . we 'll have a , have a scribe , have somebody take good notes and then that 's part of the record of the meeting . and then we did it once or twice and we postdoc a: i did it one time u but i the other thing i ' m thinking is if we wanted that thing i wonder if we 'd lose that much by having someone be a scribe by listening to the tape , to the recording afterwards and taking notes in some other interface . phd g: the , what if you 're sitting there and you just wanna make an x and you do n't wanna take notes and you 're you just wanna phd g: get the summary of the transcript from this time location like , and then while you 're bored you do n't do anything and once in a while , maybe there 's a joke and you put a x and but in other words you can use that just to highlight times in a very simple way . also with i was thinking and i know morgan disagrees with me on this but suppose you have a group in here and you wanna let them note whenever they think there might be something later that they might not wanna distribute in terms of content , they could just make an x near that point or a question mark that alerts them that when they get the transcript back they c could get some red flags in that transcript region and they can then look at it . i know we have n't been using it but i w imagine it being useful just for marking time periods which you then get back in a transcript professor b: i so , what makes one is maybe we should actually schedule some periods where people go over something later professor b: and put some summary , some there 'd be some scribe who would actually listen , w who 'd to actually listen to the whole thing , not transcribe it , but just write down things that struck them as important . but then you do n't have the time reference that you 'd have if you had it live . phd f: how do you synchronize the time in the crosspad and the time of the recording ? grad h: that was one of the issues we talked about originally and that 's w part of the difficulty is that we need an infrastructure for using the time the crosspads and so that means synchronizing the time you want it pretty close and there 's a fair amount of skew because it 's a hand - held unit with a battery grad h: and so you have to synchronize at the beginning of each meeting all the pads that are being used , so that it 's synchronized with the time on that and then you have to download to an application , and then you have to figure out what the data formats are and convert it over if you wanna do anything with this information . postdoc a: there is an alternative , it 's still , there 's , your point stands about there be needing to be an infrastructure , but it does n't have to be synchronized with the little clock 's timer on it . you c , i when i did it i synchronized it by voice , by whispering " one , two , three , four " onto the microphone and , . grad h: , but then there 's the infrastructure at the other end which someone has to listen to that and find that point , phd g: , could we keep one of these things for another year ? would h is there a big cau phd g: even maybe some of the transcribers who might be wanting to annotate f just there 's a bunch of things that might be neat to do but i it might not be the case that we can actually synchronize them and then do all the infrastructure but we could at least try it out . professor b: one thing that we might try is on some set of meetings , some collection of meetings , maybe edu is the right one or maybe something else , we get somebody to buy into the idea of doing this as part of the task . , part of the reason that adam was so interested in the speechcorder f idea from the beginning is he said from the beginning he hated taking notes and so and jane is more into it i if you wanna really do this all the time so to get someone to actually buy into it and have at least some series of meetings where we do it . and if so , it 's probably worth having one . the p the problem with the more extended view , all these other with quibbling about particular applications of it is that it looks like it 's hard to get people to routinely use it , it just has n't happened anyway . but maybe if we can get a person to phd g: i do n't think it has to be part of a what everybody does in a meeting but it might be a useful , neat part of the project that we can , show off as a mechanism for synchronizing events in time that happen that you just wanna make a note of , like what jane was talking about with some later browsing , just as a convenience , even if it 's not a full - blown note taking substitute . phd e: if you wanted to do that maybe the right architecture for it is to get a pda with a wireless card . and and that way you can synchronize very easily with the meeting because you 'll be synchroni you can synchronize with the linux server and phd e: you have a pda and may and you could have the same x interface or whatever , you 'd have to do a little bit of coding to do it . but you could imagine , phd e: , if all you really wanted was you did n't want this secondary note - taking channel but just being able to use m markers of some sort , a pda with a l a wireless card would be the probably the right way to go . even buttons you could do , , as you said . grad h: for what you ' ve been describing buttons would be even more convenient than anything else , phd g: , i do n't have , grandiose ideas in mind but i ' m just thinking we ' ve we 're getting into the next year now and we have a lot of these things worked out at in terms of the speech maybe somebody will be interested in this and professor b: where like one button was " - " and then another button was " that 's great " and another button " that 's f " phd g: or like this is my " i ' m supposed to do this " button , like " i better remember to " grad h: the crosspad idea is a good one . it 's just a question of getting people to use it and getting the infrastructure set up in such a way that it 's not a lot of extra work . that 's part of the reason why it has n't happened is that it 's been a lot of extra work for me postdoc a: but it 's also , it has this problem of having to go from an analog to a d a digital record too , postdoc a: but , say , if i if you 're writing notes in it does it ca n't do handwriting recognition , right ? professor b: no , no , but it 's just storing the pixel informa position information , it 's all digital . postdoc a: i what i ' m thinking is that the pda solution you h you have it already without needing to go from the pixelization to a phd g: it also it 's maybe realistic cuz people are supposed to be bringing their p d as to the meeting eventually , right ? that 's why we have this little i what i do n't wanna more work for anyone but imagine some interesting things that you could do with it and so if we do n't have to return it and we can keep it for a year i . grad h: w we do n't we certainly do n't have to return it , as i said . all all he said is that if you 're not using it could you return it , if you are using it feel free to keep it . that we have n't used it and are we going to ? professor b: so we have no but by i would suggest you return one . because we , we have n't used it . phd g: one would probably be fine . maybe we could do like a student project , maybe someone who wants to do this as their main like s project for something would be . grad h: if we had them out and sitting on the table people might use them a little more professor b: maybe jeremy could sit in some meetings and press a button when there when somebody laughed . phd g: jeremy 's gon na be an he 's a new student starting on modeling brea breath and laughter , actually , which sounds funny but it should be , grad h: equipment . ordered , i ' m always gon na do that . w we ordered more wireless , and so they should be coming in at some point . and then at the same time i 'll probably rewire the room as per jane 's suggestion so that the first n channels are wireless , are the m the close - talking and the next n are far - field . professor b: what he means but is n't that funny sounding ? we ordered more wireless . it 's like wires are the things so you 're wiring you 're you we 're we ordered more absence of the thing . professor b: there 's all this going on between andreas and dave and chuck and others with various kinds of runs recognition runs , trying to figure things out about the features but it 's all in process , so there 's not much to say right now . why do n't we start with our esteemed guest . phd g: , i ' m just thinking , are you gon na try to save the data before this next group comes in ? , so we might wanna do it simultaneous . professor b: ok , a one and a two and a three . ok , babble , take five .
###summary: this meeting of the berkley meeting recorder group charts the progress of their project and covers ongoing issues as well as some new ones. the most pressing issue concerns the demos which the group are preparing for the darpa meeting next month. here they discuss the querying and indexing tool which is progressing well albeit with a few front-end issues , and also the transcriber tool. transcription is progressing well , with new people hired , and double checking almost complete. work is also going on in parallel with ibm. additionally , the group have progressed further with data storage issues , with backing-up their data now regarded as a priority , and more disk space required. tools for accessing key file information have been developed which should ensure all meeting information is present. the collection of crosspad note-taking data will be pursued in future meetings. finally , other progress made includes getting the channeltrans interface working , ordering more wireless microphones , and analysing recognition runs. darpa demo illustrating prosody of meeting events will be completed by the end of the ( next ) month , so as to allow a week or so for transferring data across to laptops. after consulting others , the group decide that not backing up their meeting data is a bad idea , since this cannot be recovered. therefore , meeting recorder data will be backed up , and also stored manually using the nw archive. more disk space will be purchased , however for now , data which is easily re-creatable will not be backed up. after evaluating the use of the crosspads , the group decide to return one , and also keep one which will be left out in meetings to encourage its use. use of pdas and buttons for note-taking will be investigated , along with using the data for a student research project. because of time constraints , the group decide to do simultaneous digits. improving the thisl front-end user interface may be difficult if it is to run on windows as a web server tcl-tk may need to be used instead. more information on xml transcription formats is required for the creation of the tools. information for key files , such as microphone type , seating , and participant information , is not being properly recorded , and in some cases the microphones aren't working properly. however this should be rectified by the use of appropriate xml tools. the crosspads have not been used to their full potential , which is because of a number of problems regarding their use: first , they need to be synchronised with the time of the meeting recording , and secondly , they use a non standard data format which needs converting. additionally , some people tend not to make notes in meetings. several transcribers have now been hired , and double-checking is almost finished. information retrieval will progress using uncorrected transcripts. in parallel to the transcription , the first five edu meetings are chunked and ready to go to ibm , once the ibm transcript is checked and satisfactory. for the darpa demo: tools have been written to convert everything into the correct file formats , an now the thistl back-end querying and indexing tool is now working on the command line. work is also underway to improve the front-end thistl interface. the demo of transcriber interface was discussed , and may include graphical illustration of prosodic features indicating sentence or turn boundaries. work is continuing to create tools for handling xml data , which extract data from the xml key files. tools will also be provided to ensure that appropriate meeting information is present , and that microphones and recording is working. the channeltrans interface is now working on windows machines. more wireless microphones have been ordered , and the room is to be re-wired as suggested by jane , using the wireless close-talking microphones first , and then the far-field microphones. analysis of the recognition runs to identify features and their characteristics is on-going.