Large Scale Language Modeling in Automatic Speech Recognition

Posted by Ciprian Chelba, Research ScientistAt Google, we’re able to use the large amounts of data made available by the Web’s fast growth. Two such data sources are the anonymized queries on google.com and the web itself. They help improve automatic speech recognition through large language models: Voice Search makes use of the former, whereas YouTube speech transcription benefits significantly from the latter. The language model is the component...

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Ngram Viewer 2.0

Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering ManagerSince launching the Google Books Ngram Viewer, we’ve been overjoyed by the public reception. Co-creator Will Brockman and I hoped that the ability to track the usage of phrases across time would be of interest to professional linguists, historians, and bibliophiles. What we didn’t expect was its popularity among casual users. Since the launch in 2010, the Ngram Viewer has been used about 50 times every minute...

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ReFr: A New Open-Source Framework for Building Reranking Models

Posted by Dan Bikel and Keith Hall, Research Scientists at GoogleWe are pleased to announce the release of an open source, general-purpose framework designed for reranking problems, ReFr (Reranker Framework), now available at: http://code.google.com/p/refr/. Many types of systems capable of processing speech and human language text produce multiple hypothesized outputs for a given input, each with a score. In the case of machine translation systems, these hypotheses correspond to possible translations from some sentence in a source language to...

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EMEA Faculty Summit 2012

Michel Benard, University Relations ManagerLast week we held our fifth Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Faculty Summit in London, bringing together 94 of EMEA’s foremost computer science academics from 65 universities representing 25 countries, together with more than 60 Googlers. This year’s jam-packed agenda included a welcome reception at the Science Museum (plus a tour of the special exhibition: “Codebreaker - Alan Turing’s life and legacy”), a keynote on “Research at Google” by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives...

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