APyCA: Towards the automatic subtitling of television content in Spanish

Automatic subtitling of television content has become an approachable challenge due to the advancement of the technology involved. In addition, it has also become a priority need for many Spanish TV broadcasters, who will have to broadcast up to 90% of subtitled content by 2013 to comply with recently approved national audiovisual policies. APyCA, the prototype system described in this paper, has been developed in an attempt to automate the process of subtitling television content in Spanish through the application of state-of-the-art speech and language technologies. Voice activity detection, automatic speech recognition and alignment, discourse segment detection and speaker diarization have proved to be useful to generate time-coded colour-assigned draft transcriptions for post-editing. The productive benefit of the followed approach heavily depends on the performance of the speech recognition module, which achieves reasonable results on clean read speech but degrades as this becomes more noisy and/or spontaneous.