Improved Conference Captions from Amazon Mechanical Turk (2)

After my initial experiments last month, I applied to the FreeBSD Foundation for funds to pay for additional human editing of the YouTube machine generated transcripts. The screenshot on the left shows an example HIT (Human Intelligence Task) available on Amazon Mechanical Turk.

The task description on the left is based on a template I created with three variables: $VIDEO_URL, $VIDEO_TITLE, and $CAPTIONS_URL. New HITs are then created by uploading a CSV file with three columns for each of those variables, e.g.

VIDEO_URL,VIDEO_TITLE,CAPTIONS_URL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMmbjJI5su0,"BSD v. GPL, Jason Dixon, NYCBSDCon 2008",http://people.FreeBSD.org/~murray/improved-captions-bsdvsgpl.sbv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe8LdJpBGJ4,"Isolating Cluster Jobs for Performance and Predictability, Brooks Davis (DCBSDCon 2009",http://people.FreeBSD.org/~murray/improved-captions-isolatingcluster.sbv

Using this method I created 12 HITs for the first pass of editing for which I offered between $9 and $14 per video. A slightly modified template with the same three variables was used to pay ~$7 per video for a second pass to further improve the transcripts improved in the first pass.

The template has gotten more detailed over the past month in response to all of the minor ways that workers submitted less than perfect transcripts. The actual SBV file format used by YouTube captions is not formally specified anywhere as far as I can tell, but the 60 character maximum width and simple format can be verified in submitted transcripts with a few emacs macros.

The transcript files have been checked into the FreeBSD Doc CVS Repository. The full list of videos with human-edited English language transcripts is:

• "M. Warner Losh, An Overview of FreeBSD/mips, AsiaBSDCon2009" (captions)
  
• "AsiaBSDCon 2009: Internet Mail — Past, Present, and (a bit of) the Future" (captions)
  
• "A. Rao: The Locking Infrastructure in the FreeBSD kernel #1" (captions)
  
• "A. Rao: The Locking Infrastructure in the FreeBSD kernel #2" (captions)
  
• "PC-BSD, Matt Olander, AsiaBSDCon 2008" (captions)
  
• "FreeBSD, Protecting Privacy with Tor" (captions)
  
• "Isolating Cluster Jobs for Performance and Predictability, Brooks Davis (DCBSDCon 2009" (captions)
  
• "Richard Bejtlich, Network Security Monitoring Using FreeBSD" (captions)
  
• "Jason Dixon Closing Remarks of DCBSDCon - BSD is Still Dying" (captions)
  
• "A Narrative History of BSD, Dr. Kirk McKusick" (captions)
  
• "BSD is Dying, Jason Dixon, NYCBSDCon 2007" (captions)
  
• "BSD v. GPL, Jason Dixon, NYCBSDCon 2008" (captions)
  
• "FreeBSD Kernel Internals, Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick" (captions)
  

Improved Conference Captions from Amazon Mechanical Turk

Just wanted to send a quick note that three of the popular videos from the BSD Conferences YouTube channel have been updated with human-edited English language caption files. These offer a significant improvement over the machine generated captions I wrote about last month.

The following videos have been updated:

• PC-BSD, Matt Olander, AsiaBSDCon 2008 (transcript text)
  
• FreeBSD Kernel Internals, Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick (transcript text)
  
• A Narrative History of BSD, Dr. Kirk McKusick (transcript text)
  

I've also posted three simple captions text files which provide the times and text in a very simple ascii format in case anyone wants to provide a diff to improve any remaining mistakes in the captions.

The transcriptions were done with the help of the industrious workers behind Amazon Mechanical Turk. The three transcripts above, representing at least 6 person hours of work, but easily twice that much time, were completed for less than $50 by leveraging the timing information from free machine generated captions and mechanical turk for the editing. This is less than 1/10th of the cost of a commercial transcription service.

What is the quality of these captions in other languages when automatically translated with YouTube? Are there any other videos for which captions would particularly be useful?

AsiaBSDCon is coming up in March, and I hope to have things streamlined by then such that videos with both Japanese and English captions can be added to the channel shortly after the conference.