Publication Details
Automated Interpretation of Air Traffic Control Communication: The Journey from Spoken Words to a Deeper Understanding of the Meaning
HELMKE, H.
SHETTY, S.
OHNEISER, O.
EHR, H.
Prasad Amrutha (DCGM)
Motlíček Petr, doc. Ing., Ph.D. (DCGM)
HARFMANN, J.
air traffic control, ATC command ontology, command extraction, language
understanding, command recognition rate, JSON
Sophisticated Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies have become
increasingly popular and are widely used in all domains over the years. Systems
like Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa are integrated into our day-to-day lives.
These systems offer a wide range of possible applications just by understanding
human speech. However, in the Air Traffic Control (ATC) domain, even the most
advanced simulators can just partially replace expensive pseudo-pilots. In spite
of having a standardized ATC phraseology, it is still a major challenge to
recognize and correctly understand the communication between air traffic
controllers (ATCo) and pilots. This is because understanding an ATCo-pilot
communication requires more than just transforming speech to a sequence of words.
For most ATC applications, perfectly recognizing the sequence of words would not
be useful, if the meaning behind the word sequence cannot be correctly
interpreted. Recently, 20 European partners from Air Traffic Management (ATM)
domain have agreed on a common set of rules, i.e., an ontology on how to
transform the spoken words into ATC instructions that clearly define the meaning
of the words and make them usable for different applications. In this paper, we
present an extension of the mentioned ontology to make it usable for pilot speech
as well. We also show some of the challenges faced in understanding the meaning
of ATCo-pilot communication and describe our approach of tackling them.
Furthermore, we present an algorithm to transform words automatically into
ontology instructions and describe the interfaces used to ensure a consistent and
reliable communication of ATC instructions. This interface includes, besides
other information, plausibility values, different speakers, and ambiguous
outputs.
@inproceedings{BUT176484,
author="KLEINERT, M. and HELMKE, H. and SHETTY, S. and OHNEISER, O. and EHR, H. and PRASAD, A. and MOTLÍČEK, P. and HARFMANN, J.",
title="Automated Interpretation of Air Traffic Control Communication: The Journey from Spoken Words to a Deeper Understanding of the Meaning",
booktitle="Proceedings of DASC 2021",
year="2021",
pages="1--9",
publisher="Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers",
address="San Antonio, Texas",
doi="10.1109/DASC52595.2021.9594387",
isbn="978-1-6654-3420-1",
url="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9594387"
}