Recognition and Understanding of Meetings: The AMI and AMIDA Projects

Steve Renals (1), Thomas Hain (2) and Herve Bourlard (3)

(1) Centre for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH3 5EU, UK
(2) Dept. of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S1 4DP, UK 
(3) IDIAP Research Institute, 1920 Martigny, Switzerland

The AMI and AMIDA projects are concerned with the recognition and
interpretation of multiparty meetings.  Within these projects we
have: developed an infrastructure for  recording meetings using
multiple microphones and cameras; released a 100 hour annotated
corpus of meetings;  developed techniques for the recognition and
interpretation of meetings based primarily on speech recognition
and computer vision;  and developed an evaluation framework at
both component and system levels.  In this paper we present an
overview of these projects, with an emphasis on speech recognition
and content extraction.