digital methodologies for global media research Randy Kluver Dept of Communication Texas A&M University speech, language and digital media: History BBN developed one of the first continuous speech understanding systems. First software-only, real-time, large-vocabulary, speaker independent continuous speech recognition. First demonstration of 20,000-word real time speech recognizer. HARK Recognizer product introduced. Pioneered statistical language understanding and data extraction. First use of statistical modeling for speaker identification. Introduced Byblos recognition system with context-dependent phonetic units. Audio Mining system combines speech and language processing to index broadcast news. Development of multi-lingual optical character recognition (OCR). Real-time monitoring of foreign broadcast news with retrieval, alert, and playback capabilities.. Call center automation launched. First demonstration of speech transmission over ARPANET using 2400 bit/s LPC speech coding. DARPA GALE contract awarded in 2005 focusing on machine translation First Demonstration of end-to-end GALE Distillation, DARPA MADCAT, TSWG CALL TSWG GMT, DARPA BOLT, Operational deployment of Media Monitoring and TransTalk Raytheon BBN Technologies Corp., Proprietary Information. All Rights Reserved. Multi-Media Monitoring System (M3S) at Texas A&M Satellite Television: stream, automatically transcribe and translate foreign language broadcasts 24/7 video stream with machine-generated transcript and translation Data then remains available within the system for later research Web sites Targeted websites in languages of interest Broad-based identification of websites that provide solid regional perspective Social media Based on selected social media actors, and captures all tweets, retweets, and mentions Currently support Twitter and Facebook (Arabic only) Russian under development (mid-2016) 3 advantages to this system Provides bigger data approach to global media studies, by harvesting large amounts of content Allows English-language access to content that is inaccessible to users without target language skills. Allows keyword searchable/Boolean searches on content in either english or target language over entirety of dataset Archives material in an unaltered/unedited format for multiple types of analysis Creates exportable clips and/or rich media content for incorporation into analysis, reports, or other media 4 broadcast translation system 5 story view pivot view of stories 7 network analysis of twitter influence 8 developing research agendas Globalize traditional research agendas Multi-modal (broadcast/web/social media) Multi-lingual/regional Framing, content analysis, cross-platform agenda setting Regional, comparative Broadens the scope dramatically of available data Allow studies that normally cannot be studied across cultural/linguistic boundaries Potential for new methods Sharable, marked-up databases Big data approaches 9 where we are going: Developing M3S as an academic/pedagogical resource Developing collaborative research projects with key researchers/institutions Developing research templates for the archive Creating datasets of key global media content for use by multiple scholars Eg, Arab Spring Archive Developing a corpus of research to emerge from the systems to raise the visibility Technical Refinement Developing mechanism for incorporating digital object architecture into the systems Developing meta-tagging capacity to current content Improving usability of the system 10 partners Partners TSWG (Technical Support Working Group- Department of Defense) BBN Raytheon Technologies CNRI-Center for National Research Initiatives For more info: mms.tamu.edu, gnma.tamu.edu 11