Report Satellite Workshop – Speech Recognition in Air Traffic Management @ Interspeech 2021

The HAAWAII project conducted a Satellite Workshop at the Interspeech on 30/08/2021. 60 attendees from three different continents participated. 30% were directly present in Brno and the other participants were connected remotely via zoom.

Two presentations were given with respect to callsign extraction from especially pilot utterances. MITRE addressed the challenges and especially the benefits from offline analyzing the monthly available speech recordings from nearly all centers of the FAA. Speaker classification of pilot and air traffic controller (ATCo) utterances and also workload analysis from ATCo utterances were addressed by two presentations. The ATCO2 project aims to create a public available data set with voice recordings and corresponding ADSB data. Honeywell presented their cockpit activities with respect to automatic speech recognition. Finally Prof. Helmke presented the need for common metrics also considering speech understanding performance so that different speech recognition and understanding applications are comparable. Callsign recognition rate or command recognition rates, based on the ontology developed by 16-04 project and extended by HAAWAII project are first candidates.

The following questions & answers discussion addressed

  • the challenges of certification of AI based system for ATM,
  • the technical challenges of bringing ASR applications to the ops room and
  • how to benefit from different ASR implementations, which includes exchange of training data and building blocks for e.g. diarization, speaker classification, speech-to-text and text-to-concepts transformations.

More information and the presentations can be found here.