Sliding Alignment Windows for Real-Time Crowd Captioning

The primary way of providing real-time speech to text captioning for hard of hearing people is to employ expensive professional stenographers who can type as fast as natural speaking rates. Recent work has shown that a feasible alternative is to combine the partial captions of ordinary typists, each of whom is able to type only part of what they hear. In this paper, we extend the state of the art fixed-window alignment algorithm (Naim et al., 2013) for combining the individual captions into a final output sequence. Our method performs alignment on a sliding window of the input sequences, drastically reducing both the number of errors and the latency of the system to the end user over the previously published approaches.