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Julien FAYOLLE

I am a 2nd-year PhD student in the INRIA / TEXMEX reasearch team at the University of Rennes 1, working on "Information retrieval in TV streams" under the supervision of Fabienne Moreau, Christian Raymond, Guillaume Gravier and Patrick Gros.

I obtained a master degree in Signal, Image, Embedded Systems and Automatics (SISEA) in 2009 and graduated from the ENSSAT engineering school in Electronics, Industrial Informatics and Multimedia Data Processing in 2008.

See my resume.


Research Topics

I am generally interested in :

I work more specifically on :


Information retrieval in TV streams

The main focus of our research is to conceive new generation of information retrieval (IR) systems for TV streams considering that recognizing the speech is the best - or at least the easiest - way to extract the semantic information to be indexed. Directly indexing automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts remains nevertheless a difficult task. These transcripts are unstructured (there is no sentence, no punctuation and no capitalization) and noisy (they contain erroneous words that don't convey the original meaning of the truly uttered words). There are two main consequences : first, classical natural language processing techniques often used on structured and clean text to extract relevant information are not adapted to that kind of data; second, depending on the word error rate, they miss more or less relevant information such as named entities (e.g. names, places, organizations) and out-of-vocabulary words (e.g. specialised terms, neologisms, unknown named entities).

This work first aims at finding a more precise and less noisy representation of speech than the classical ASR textual transcripts for high-level and robust spoken content analysis tasks such as summerization, machine translation, topic threading or document expansion. Word-level confidence measures ([Fayolle et al. IS 2010] and [Fayolle et al. AND 2010]) indicating the reliability of the recognized words can be used to distinguish the reliable areas of the transcripts that may worth to be kept from the unreliable areas that worth to be removed or better to be replaced by a lower level of representation (e.g. sub-words, audio features) keeping a part of the information to be retrieved. Named entities can also be recognized by robust methods when they are present in the transcripts ([Raymond and Fayolle TALN 2010]). To better represent spoken contents, we propose to combine the multi-level and reliable information that are following :

  1. low-level information (sub-words, audio features, etc.) to replace the unreliable words of the transcripts,
  2. word-level information (words, part-of-speech tags, etc.) when they are reliable in the transcripts,
  3. high-level information (complex terms, named entities, etc.) when they are reliable and well-recognized in the transcripts.

Second, we would like to use this multi-level represention for speech-based multimedia content retrieval. This implies to adapt the classical IR techniques to multi-level indexes for which we will have to define their structure, their relations, their combination and the different searching strategies. We have also to take into account that the notion of document is not clearly defined in the context of TV streams.


Publications

International Conferences

  1. Julien Fayolle, Fabienne Moreau, Christian Raymond, Guillaume Gravier. Reshaping Automatic Speech Transcripts for Robust High-level Spoken Document Analysis. In 4th Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data, AND'10, Toronto, Canada, October 2010. details Hal : Hyper Archive en ligne doi [slides]
  2. Julien Fayolle, Fabienne Moreau, Christian Raymond, Guillaume Gravier, Patrick Gros. CRF-based Combination of Contextual Features to Improve A Posteriori Word-level Confidence Measures. In International Conference on Speech Communication and Technologies, Interspeech'10, Pages 1942-1945, Makuhari, Japon, September 2010. details Hal : Hyper Archive en ligne pdf [slides]
  3. Christian Raymond, Julien Fayolle. Reconnaissance robuste d'entités nommées sur de la parole transcrite automatiquement. In 17e conférence sur le traitement automatique des langues naturelles, TALN'10, Montréal, Québec, Canada, July 2010. details Hal : Hyper Archive en ligne pdf [slides]

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Past Research Experience

  1. April-September 2009 : Master internship on "Topic threading and tracking in French news programs" in the TEXMEX reasearch team, the Murase Laboratory and the National Institute of Informatics under the supervision of Ichiro Ide, Shin'ichi Satoh, Guillaume Gravier and Pascale Sébillot.
  2. April-September 2008 : Engineering school internship on "Spatio-temporal synthesis of textures for low-rate video compression" in the TEMICS research team under the supervision of Christine Guillemot.


Contact

Address : Julien Fayolle, INRIA, Campus de Beaulieu, 35042 RENNES Cedex, France
Tel : +33 2 99 84 74 26 / Fax : +33 2 99 84 71 71
E-mail : julien.fayolle [at] inria.fr

Secretary: Loïc Lesage, +33 2 99 84 74 37, Loic.Lesage [at] inria.fr