New Real-Time Closed-Captioning System for Japanese Broadcast News Programs

A new real-time closed-captioning system for Japanese broadcast news programs is described. The system is based on a hybrid automatic speech recognition system that switches input speech between the original program sound and the rephrased speech by a ”re-speaker”. It minimises the number of correction operators, generally to one or two, depending on the difficulties of the speech recognition, although four correction operators were needed in our previous news system. Experiments show that the system could be used for captioning typical news programs at local stations, which have fewer staff and where simple operation is required.