RE: Additional parameters to SpeechRecognition (was "Speech API: first editor's draft posted")

It's true that the concepts of confidence an nbest are related, but they are not the same.

One example is "hotword" recognition, which might be used to wake up the application after long periods of silence, side speech, noise, etc.  The hotword grammar is often very simple (eg "wake up"), and thus multiple interpretations are extremely uncommon.  Developers would use "confidence" to avoid false positives which consume processing resources and induce the deaf periods I mentioned before.

Another example is multiple interpretations over the same acoustic parsing.  For example, the user says "I want to go to New York".  Did they mean New York city or New York state?  That's something you would deal with via the nbest list, not confidence.



From: Satish S [mailto:satish@google.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2012 1:56 PM
To: Deborah Dahl
Cc: Young, Milan; Glen Shires; Hans Wennborg; public-speech-api@w3.org
Subject: Re: Additional parameters to SpeechRecognition (was "Speech API: first editor's draft posted")

A performance conscious web app could use a smaller maxNBest value so the recognizer doesn't generate all the hypotheses and then decide to throw away some of them based on the confidence value. I don't see value in providing both in this API.

I agree all the parameters suggested have been in use over the years but we should carefully consider each one in context of web apps. Can we discuss a list of web apps which will require both maxNBest and confidenceThreshold and see how to address them? In fact it would be great to adopt that as a framework for all API discussions, i.e. provide sample web app scenarios where the change/addition will be required.

Cheers
Satish

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 9:40 PM, Deborah Dahl <dahl@conversational-technologies.com<mailto:dahl@conversational-technologies.com>> wrote:
Yes, the filtering that I was talking about is something that you would do at the level of the interaction manager, whether that's implemented on the client, or whether it's running on another server. It doesn't mean that there isn't a value in also doing some filtering on the server, for the reasons Milan pointed out.

From: Young, Milan [mailto:Milan.Young@nuance.com<mailto:Milan.Young@nuance.com>]
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2012 2:08 PM
To: Glen Shires

Cc: Hans Wennborg; Satish S; public-speech-api@w3.org<mailto:public-speech-api@w3.org>
Subject: RE: Additional parameters to SpeechRecognition (was "Speech API: first editor's draft posted")

You have ignored my two points about why it is often best to filter low confidence matches on the server (ie performance and clipping).  Just because Deborah points out that there are additional use cases for filtering on the client does not invalidate my claim.

Yes, we should try to deliver consistent behavior across UAs, speech engines, and even dialog states.  But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater if we can't nail it down in a v1.


From: Glen Shires [mailto:gshires@google.com]<mailto:[mailto:gshires@google.com]>
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2012 10:43 AM
To: Young, Milan
Cc: Hans Wennborg; Satish S; public-speech-api@w3.org<mailto:public-speech-api@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Additional parameters to SpeechRecognition (was "Speech API: first editor's draft posted")

I think (hope) that most web developers won't have to worry about confidence values because the default set by the speech recognizer should be sufficient.

However, a JS API developer savvy enough to understand how/when to properly set a confidenceThreshold, is also savvy enough to intelligently process the confidence values returned in the results. As Deborah mentioned [1], "For example, if the top two alternatives in the nbest have very similar confidences...".  Typically, processing the confidence result values is a much better strategy than trying to tune the confidenceThreshold.

Only extremely savvy JS API developers will understand how to properly tune the confidenceThreshold so that it prunes (but doesn't over prune) the data returned.  I believe these developers can best adjust the confidenceThreshold by processing the confidence result values returned by prior recognitions (as opposed to simply bumping the default value by 0.05).


Also, from an implementation standpoint, there's a major issue with making confidenceThreshold readable. If the developer switches to a new recognizer, the default confidenceThreshold may change. If the developer then reads the confidenceThreshold (for example, to increment it by 0.05), then presumably the browser needs to get the default confidence value from the speech recognizer. For a remote recognizer, this round-trip takes time, and the browser cannot stall the javascript processing.

/Glen Shires

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-speech-api/2012Apr/0031.html
On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 9:47 AM, Young, Milan <Milan.Young@nuance.com<mailto:Milan.Young@nuance.com>> wrote:
The speech community has lived for 20 years with the fact that confidence values are not portable across engines.  I understand that we are courting a new class of developers with this HTML-based initiative, but I want to be careful not to dumb it down to the point where we impact the mainstream speech industry.

Incrementally bumping up confidence (eg recognizer.confidence += 5) in response to a series of misrecognitions is a common technique.  I also find it generally ugly that confidence is special cased with a function instead of a property.  (Is it a JS limitation that you cannot mark a property as write only?)

I would rather say something like "Recognition engines generally do a good job of choosing the right confidence value for a recognition task.  If you do choose to read this property, know that it's value is not portable to other recognition tasks, other speech engines, or other user agents."

Thanks

From: Glen Shires [mailto:gshires@google.com<mailto:gshires@google.com>]
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2012 8:11 AM
To: Hans Wennborg
Cc: Young, Milan; Satish S; public-speech-api@w3.org<mailto:public-speech-api@w3.org>

Subject: Re: Additional parameters to SpeechRecognition (was "Speech API: first editor's draft posted")

confidenceThreshold

I think we all agree that speech recognizers have a concept of confidence, and that it can be mapped to a monotonically increasing range of 0.0 to 1.0.  However, specific values (for example 0.5) do not correspond to the same level of confidence for different recognizers.

I believe that if the developer does not set the confidenceThreshold, the speech recognizer should use a default value that is appropriate for that recognizer.

A complication with a confidenceThreshold attribute is defining the default value (if the value is read, but not written, what value does the BROWSER return? - particularly because the optimal default value may vary from one RECOGNIZER to another).

Perhaps instead of an attribute, this should be a write-only value, specifically a setConfidenceThreshold method.

/Glen Shires
On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 6:43 AM, Hans Wennborg <hwennborg@google.com<mailto:hwennborg@google.com>> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 17:22, Young, Milan <Milan.Young@nuance.com<mailto:Milan.Young@nuance.com>> wrote:
> There are two reasons for including confidence that I would like this community to consider:
>  Efficiency - Similar to the argument Satish put forward for limiting the size of the nbest array, pruning the result candidates at the server is more efficient.
>  Clipping - There are many environments where background noise and side speech that can trigger junk results.  If confidence is low, this will trigger a result and then the application enters a deaf period where it processes the result and discovers the content is junk.  If real speech happens during this phase, its start will be missed.
>
> Every recognizer that was ever invented has a concept of confidence.  Yes, the semantics of that value vary across platforms, but for us to push this to a custom parameter will confuse developers, and ultimately slow adoption.
Ok, I don't feel strongly about this, so I would be fine adding a
confidenceThreshold if others agree.

> Regarding the timeout family, an open-ended dialog like "Tell me what is wrong with your computer", should have generous timeouts.  Compare this to "So it's something to do with your new Google double mouse configuration, is that correct?" which should have short timeouts.
>
> Our goal should be a consistent application experience across UAs, and that's only going to happen if we standardize timeouts.  I would also like to mention that the definition of these timeouts is clear and has been industry standard for 10+ years.
What do you think about my idea of just letting the web page handle
the timeout itself, calling abort() when it decides a request is
taking too long?


Thanks,
Hans



--
Thanks!
Glen Shires




--
Thanks!
Glen Shires