Needs for a Captioning Tool

  • July 17, 2017
  • Joseph Polizzotto (HTCTU), Marshall Sunnes (NYU)

General Needs

  • major goal: offer a faster and simpler process for the creation of quality caption files (e.g., SRT files)
  • open source tool
  • accessible design ( WCAG 2.0 AA guidelines)
  • Mac, PC, and Linux versions
  • ability to save work in progress
  • documentation and best practices (e.g., clarify that time-chunked items in "raw transcript" do not correspond to eventual caption blocks)

Transcription (Step 1)

  • Produce a "raw transcript" from an audio file (e.g., WAV, MP3, MP4, OGG, M4A, FLAC, RAW, WMA et al.) using Speech to Text (STT) systems.
  • The optimal STT integration would include:
    • an open-source tool (e.g., Kaldi)
    • ability to train models on speech data
    • off-line computation available

Editing (Step 2)

  • Edit the "raw transcript", which is time-coded to the audio, in a text editor window
  • NICE TO HAVE: download auto-captions from YouTube
  • The optimal text editor screen contains the following:
    • time coding of chunks at > word-level granularity (phrase or ~7 sec intervals)
    • NICE TO HAVE: speaker diarisation (group chunks into sections based on different speakers)
    • shortcuts for Play / Pause, Previous/ Next (chunk), Increase / Decrease speed
    • automatic adjustments to text (capitalization after full-stops, question marks, exclamation marks, ellipsis)
    • quick key for adding brackets around speaker identification and sound information (brackets, parentheses should be used to tell aligner not to consider this text for the purposes of alignment)
    • settings menu for user configuration:
      • playback stops when keyboard is activated (when editing begins)
      • customize keyboard shortcuts
      • adjust the size of segmented chunks; see step #3 (e.g., number of characters per line, number of lines per caption block)
      • add honorifics and abbreviations to ignore for segmentation step; see step #3
      • adjust (optional) Aeneas parameters (other essential parameters will already be generated, such as input file types); see step #4
        • select output format (e.g., SRT, VTT, TTML, JSON)
        • Audio-head/tail length
        • Ignore non-speech sound minimum duration
        • save out addition HTML file (for fine-tuning syncmap)
        • see Aeneas docs for additional parameters, flags that could be added
    • NICE TO HAVE: RegEx find and replace

Segmenting (Step 3)

  • Segment now-edited transcript into chunks that meet quality captioning standards (http://www.captioningkey.org/quality_captioning.html)
    • e.g.,
      • lines should not exceed 35 characters per line
      • 1-2 lines per caption block
      • end-sentence punctuation always found at the end of a captioning block, not in the middle
  • scripting could be done with perl or Natural Language Processing (NLP) libraries (NLTK, spaCy) to complete this step:
    • e.g.,
      • reference a database of honorifics (Mr. Mrs. Fr. etc.) that will be ignored for segmenting purposes
      • place each sentence on its own line
      • break sentences into desirable chunks (see above)
      • add a space between each chunk (for purposes of alignment with Aeneas "subtitle" format; see step #4)
  • NICE TO HAVE:
    • review/edit screen for segmented chunks
    • preset segmenting settings based on previous projects

Aligning (Step 4)

  • Align the segmented transcript with the audio using forced alignment tool (e.g, Aeneas) and output to desired syncmap format (e.g., SRT, TTML, VTT, SBV etc.)
  • Optimal use of the aligner will include:
    • Python C, and CEW extensions are compiled on PC, Linux, and Mac

NICE TO HAVE: Checking/Fine-Tuning (Step 5)

  • Review results of syncmap file (e.g., SRT file) and correct for discrepancies in time-stamps and export correct syncmap
  • Optimal use of the fine-tuning tool (see https://github.com/ozdefir/finetuneas for example; also comes in "Third Party" directory in Aeneas package) will include:
    • increase/ decrease speed
    • toggle time-stamp display format
    • save in multiple formats
  • Note: some audio files with variable bit rate manifest unpredictable behavior in web browsers (consider adding a note on this Fine-Tuning window)

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