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1. The 2019 Inaugural Fearless Steps Challenge: A Giant Leap for Naturalistic Audio

   https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2301  

   Hansen, John H.L.; Joglekar, Aditya; Shekhar, Meena Chandra; Kothapally, Vinay; Yu, Chengzhu; Kaushik, Lakshmish; Sangwan, Abhijeet (September 2019, ISCA INTERSPEECH-2019)

   The 2019 FEARLESS STEPS (FS-1) Challenge is an initial step to motivate a streamlined and collaborative effort from the speech and language community towards addressing massive naturalistic audio, the first of its kind. The Fearless Steps Corpus is a collection of 19,000 hours of multi-channel recordings of spontaneous speech from over 450 speakers under multiple noise conditions. A majority of the Apollo Missions original analog data is unlabeled and has thus far motivated the development of both unsupervised and semi-supervised strategies. This edition of the challenge encourages the development of core speech and language technology systems for data with limited ground-truth / low resource availability and is intended to serve as the “First Step” towards extracting high-level information from such massive unlabeled corpora. In conjunction with the Challenge, 11,000 hours of synchronized 30-channel Apollo-11 audio data has also been released to the public by CRSS-UTDallas. We describe in this paper the Fearless Steps Corpus, Challenge Tasks, their associated baseline systems, and results. In conclusion, we also provide insights gained by the CRSS-UTDallas team during the inaugural Fearless Steps Challenge. 

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2. Fearless Steps Challenge Phase-3 (FSC P3): Advancing SLT for Unseen Channel and Mission Data Across NASA Apollo Audio

   https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2021-2011  

   Joglekar, Aditya; Sadjadi, Seyed Omid; Chandra-Shekar, Meena; Cieri, Christopher; Hansen, John H.L. (August 2021, ISCA INTERSPEECH-2021)

   null (Ed.)

   The Fearless Steps Challenge (FSC) initiative was designed to host a series of progressively complex tasks to promote advanced speech research across naturalistic “Big Data” corpora. The Center for Robust Speech Systems at UT-Dallas in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) conducted Phase-3 of the FSC series (FSC P3), with a focus on motivating speech and language technology (SLT) system generalizability across channel and mission diversity under the same training conditions as in Phase-2. The FSC P3 introduced 10 hours of previously unseen channel audio from Apollo-11 and 5 hours of novel audio from Apollo-13 to be evaluated over both previously established and newly introduced SLT tasks with streamlined tracks. This paper presents an overview of the newly introduced conversational analysis tracks, Apollo-13 data, and analysis of system performance for matched and mismatched challenge conditions. We also discuss the Phase-3 challenge results, evolution of system performance across the three Phases, and next steps in the Challenge Series. 

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3. FEARLESS STEPS: Novel Incentives in Naturalistic Corpora Development

   John H.L. Hansen, Aditya Joglekar (June 2022, LREC-NIDCP-2022: 2nd Workshop on Novel Incentives in Data Collection from People: Models, Implementations, Challenges and Results)

   In this study, we present the Fearless Steps APOLLO Community Resource, a collection of audio and corresponding meta-data diarized from the NASA Apollo Missions. Massive naturalistic speech data which is time-synchronized, without any human subject privacy constraints is very rare and difficult to organize, collect, and deploy. The Apollo Missions Audio is the largest collection of multi-speaker multi-channel data, where over 600 personnel are communicating over multiple missions to achieve strategic space exploration goals. A total of 12 manned missions over a six-year period produced extensive 30-track 1-inch analog tapes containing over 150,000 hours of audio. This presents the wider research community a unique opportunity to extract multi-modal knowledge in speech science, team cohesion and group dynamics, and historical archive preservation. We aim to make this entire resource and supporting speech technology meta-data creation publicly available as a Community Resource for the development of speech and behavioral science. Here we present the development of this community resource, our outreach efforts, and technological developments resulting from this data. We finally discuss the planned future directions for this community resource. 

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4. FEARLESS STEPS: ADVANCEMENTS IN SPEECH TECHNOLOGY AND CORPUS DEVELOPMENT FOR NATURALISTIC AUDIO

   Joglekar, A.; Hansen, J.H.L.; Yousefi, M.; Chandra Shekar, M.; Chen, S.-J.; Belitz, C. (February 2023, NASA Human Research Program Investigators Conference)

   INTRODUCTION: CRSS-UTDallas initiated and oversaw the efforts to recover APOLLO mission communications by re-engineering the NASA SoundScriber playback system, and digitizing 30-channel analog audio tapes – with the entire Apollo-11, Apollo-13, and Gemini-8 missions during 2011-17 [1,6]. This vast data resource was made publicly available along with supplemental speech & language technologies meta-data based on CRSS pipeline diarization transcripts and conversational speaker time-stamps for Apollo team at NASA Mission Control Center, [2,4]. In 2021, renewed efforts over the past year have resulted in the digitization of an additional +50,000hrs of audio from Apollo 7,8,9,10,12 missions, and remaining A-13 tapes. Cumulative digitization efforts have enabled the development of the largest publicly available speech data resource with unprompted, real conversations recorded in naturalistic environments. Deployment of this massive corpus has inspired multiple collaborative initiatives such as Web resources ExploreApollo (https://app.exploreapollo.org) LanguageARC (https://languagearc.com/projects/21) [3]. ExploreApollo.org serves as the visualization and play-back tool, and LanguageARC the crowd source subject content tagging resource developed by UG/Grad. Students, intended as an educational resource for k-12 students, and STEM/Apollo enthusiasts. Significant algorithmic advancements have included advanced deep learning models that are now able to improve automatic transcript generation quality, and even extract high level knowledge such as ID labels of topics being spoken across different mission stages. Efficient transcript generation and topic extraction tools for this naturalistic audio have wide applications including content archival and retrieval, speaker indexing, education, group dynamics and team cohesion analysis. Some of these applications have been deployed in our online portals to provide a more immersive experience for students and researchers. Continued worldwide outreach in the form of the Fearless Steps Challenges has proven successful with the most recent Phase-4 of the Challenge series. This challenge has motivated research in low level tasks such as speaker diarization and high level tasks like topic identification. IMPACT: Distribution and visualization of the Apollo audio corpus through the above mentioned online portals and Fearless Steps Challenges have produced significant impact as a STEM education resource for K-12 students as well as a SLT development resource with real-world applications for research organizations globally. The speech technologies developed by CRSS-UTDallas using the Fearless Steps Apollo corpus have improved previous benchmarks on multiple tasks [1, 5]. The continued initiative will extend the current digitization efforts to include over 150,000 hours of audio recorded during all Apollo missions. ILLUSTRATION: We will demonstrate WebExploreApollo and LanguageARC online portals with newly digitized audio playback in addition to improved SLT baseline systems, the results from ASR and Topic Identification systems which will include research performed on the corpus conversational. Performance analysis visualizations will also be illustrated. We will also display results from the past challenges and their state-of-the-art system improvements. 

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5. Fearless Steps APOLLO: Challenges in keyword spotting and topic detection for naturalistic audio streams

   Joglekar, A.; Lopez-Espejo, I.; Hansen, J.H.L. (May 2023, Program of the meeting Acoustical Society of America)

   Fearless Steps (FS) APOLLO is a + 50,000 hr audio resource established by CRSS-UTDallas capturing all communications between NASA-MCC personnel, backroom staff, and Astronauts across manned Apollo Missions. Such a massive audio resource without metadata/unlabeled corpus provides limited benefit for communities outside Speech-and-Language Technology (SLT). Supplementing this audio with rich metadata developed using robust automated mechanisms to transcribe and highlight naturalistic communications can facilitate open research opportunities for SLT, speech sciences, education, and historical archival communities. In this study, we focus on customizing keyword spotting (KWS) and topic detection systems as an initial step towards conversational understanding. Extensive research in automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech activity, and speaker diarization using manually transcribed 125 h FS Challenge corpus has demonstrated the need for robust domain-specific model development. A major challenge in training KWS systems and topic detection models is the availability of word-level annotations. Forced alignment schemes evaluated using state-of-the-art ASR show significant degradation in segmentation performance. This study explores challenges in extracting accurate keyword segments using existing sentence-level transcriptions and proposes domain-specific KWS-based solutions to detect conversational topics in audio streams. 

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