University of Pennsylvania Professor Mark Liberman has an interesting analysis of some of our PodZinger transcriptions. Prof. Liberman was searching PodZinger for any interviews of George Deutsch, a former NASA public affairs officer.
Deutsch resigned his position last week after intense public scrutiny when it was reported by the Scientific Activist Blog that he lied on his resume by listing a degree from Texas A&M which he never received. For more background information on this, check out: the Scientific Activist Blog, a New York Times account, the Bad Astronomy Blog, and Deutsch’s article that the theory that a Satanic cult killed Laci Peterson is “actually quite credible.”
Prof. Liberman’s search for “NASA” turned up good relevant Podcasts, but there were some funny transcriptions. “NASA’s top uh climate scientist” came out “nasa’s top arafat climate scientists.” Our speech recognition works with a language model trained mostly on news articles. My theory is that “top Arafat aide” is disproprtionately represented in our language model due to the time window of our training data and news-weighted inputs, leading to a likelihood that the bigram “top Arafat” appears.
Also, check out Prof. Liberman’s prior post titled “PodZinger rejects Jesus.” It is quite humorous and a good look at how our technology works. However, if you listen to the last podcast referenced in that post, be sure to be in a work/kid-safe place!
