In this paper, we address the task of incremental language modeling for automatic transcription of broadcast news speech. Daily broadcast news naturally contains new words that are not in the lexicon of the speech recognition system but are important for downstream applications such as information retrieval or machine translation. To recognize those new words, the lexicon and the language model of the speech recognition system need to be updated periodically. We propose a method of estimating a list of words to be added to the lexicon based on some time-series text data. The experimental results on the RT04 Broadcast News data and other TV audio data showed that this method provided an impressive and stable reduction in both out-of-vocabulary rates and speech recognition word error rates.

In this paper, we propose topic extraction models based on statistical relevance scores between topic words and words in articles, and report results obtained in topic extraction experiments using continuous speech recognition for Japanese broadcast news utterances. We attempt to represent a topic of news speech using a combination of multiple topic words, which are important words in the news article or words relevant to the news. We assume a topic of news is represented by a combination of words. We statistically model mapping from words in an article to topic words. Using the mapping, the topic extraction model can extract topic words even if they do not appear in the article. We train a topic extraction model capable of computing the degree of relevance between a topic word and a word in an article by using newspaper text covering a five-year period. The degree of relevance between those words is calculated based on measures such as mutual information or the χ2-method. In experiments extracting five topic words using a χ2-based model, we achieve 72% precision and 12% recall for speech recognition results. Speech recognition results generally include a number of recognition errors, which degrades topic extraction performance. To avoid this, we employ N-best candidates and likelihood given by acoustic and language models. In experiments, we find that extracting five topic words using N-best candidate and likelihood values achieves significantly improved precision.