Porting an audio partitioner across domains

Partitioning an audio stream means to segment It In acoustically homogeneous chunks, classify segments into acoustic classes, and cluster speech segments. The process represents the earliest stage of automatic transcription stations, since it allows to filter out portions of the audio not containing speech and to improve recognition accuracy through the use of condition-dependent acoustic models and adaptation techniques. Hence, when transcription systems are applied to new domains, the process of porting involves the partitioner module too. In this work, the porting of the partitioner of the ITC-irst broadcast news transcription system to the domain of historical films is described in detail and experimentally evaluated. Moreover, a new technique that makes the porting easier for the automatic estimation of the working point of the BIC-based segmentation algorithm is introduced.