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Comparing the Accuracy of ACE and WER Caption Metrics When Applied to Live Television Captioning

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Computers Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP-AAATE 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13341))

Abstract

The development of caption metrics is relatively new in the accessibility research community. However, little work has been done comparing the effectiveness of newly developed caption metrics. More specifically, in low accuracy settings such as live television, where users report the most difficulty using captions. Through a user study with fifteen participants, we compared two caption metrics systems, Word Error Rate (WER) and Automated-Caption Evaluation (ACE), for their accuracy in evaluating caption quality in live television. We compared human-perceived quality statistics with each caption metric’s data. Analysis of the correlation between human statistics and each caption metric found that WER had a slightly higher correlation with participants. We found that ACE was more sensitive to errors that WER, and penalized captions more than participants. However, the difference in performance between WER and ACE was not statistically significant, and neither WER nor ACE are optimized for use with live television captioning. Future work should explore how caption metrics could be better optimized for use with live television.

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Acknowledgements

The contents of this paper were developed in part under a grant from the National Science Foundation, grant #1757836 (REU AICT) and under a grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR grant number #90DPCP0002). NIDILRR is a Center within the Administration for Community Living (ACL), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The contents of this poster do not necessarily represent the policy of NIDILRR, ACL, HHS, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government. We thank Akhter Al-Amin and Mariana Arroyo Chavez for their help with calculating the caption metrics for the videos.

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Correspondence to Raja Kushalnagar .

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Wells, T., Christoffels, D., Vogler, C., Kushalnagar, R. (2022). Comparing the Accuracy of ACE and WER Caption Metrics When Applied to Live Television Captioning. In: Miesenberger, K., Kouroupetroglou, G., Mavrou, K., Manduchi, R., Covarrubias Rodriguez, M., Penáz, P. (eds) Computers Helping People with Special Needs. ICCHP-AAATE 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13341. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08648-9_61

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08648-9_61

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-08647-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-08648-9

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