Time is of the essence: an evaluation of temporal compression algorithms

  • Authors:
  • Simon Tucker;Steve Whittaker

  • Affiliations:
  • Sheffield University, UK, Sheffield, UK;Sheffield University, UK, Sheffield, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Although speech is a potentially rich information source, a major barrier to exploiting speech archives is the lack of useful tools for efficiently accessing lengthy speech recordings. This paper develops and evaluates techniques for temporal compression - reducing the time people take to listen to a recording while still extracting critical information. We first describe an exploratory study that identifies novel excision techniques that remove unimportant words or utterances from the recording. We then develop a new method for evaluating how well temporal compression supports users in forming a general understanding of a recording. Applying this method, we demonstrate that excision techniques are generally more effective than standard compression techniques that simply speed up the entire recording.