This model allow to perform named-entity recognition (NER) on air traffic control communications data. We solve this challenge by performing token classification (NER) with a BERT model. We fine-tune a pretrained BERT model on the ner task.

For instance, if you have the following transcripts/gold annotations:

Could you tell what are the main entities in the communication? The desired output is shown below:

This model is a fine-tuned version of bert-base-uncased on the atco2_corpus_1h.

It achieves the following results on the development set:

Paper: ATCO2 corpus: A Large-Scale Dataset for Research on Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding of Air Traffic Control Communications

Authors: Juan Zuluaga-Gomez, Karel Veselý, Igor Szöke, Petr Motlicek, Martin Kocour, Mickael Rigault, Khalid Choukri, Amrutha Prasad and others

Abstract: Personal assistants, automatic speech recognizers and dialogue understanding systems are becoming more critical in our interconnected digital world. A clear example is air traffic control (ATC) communications. ATC aims at guiding aircraft and controlling the airspace in a safe and optimal manner. These voice-based dialogues are carried between an air traffic controller (ATCO) and pilots via very-high frequency radio channels. In order to incorporate these novel technologies into ATC (low-resource domain), large-scale annotated datasets are required to develop the data-driven AI systems. Two examples are automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU). In this paper, we introduce the ATCO2 corpus, a dataset that aims at fostering research on the challenging ATC field, which has lagged behind due to lack of annotated data. The ATCO2 corpus covers 1) data collection and pre-processing, 2) pseudo-annotations of speech data, and 3) extraction of ATC-related named entities. The ATCO2 corpus is split into three subsets. 1) ATCO2-test-set corpus contains 4 hours of ATC speech with manual transcripts and a subset with gold annotations for named-entity recognition (callsign, command, value). 2) The ATCO2-PL-set corpus consists of 5281 hours of unlabeled ATC data enriched with automatic transcripts from an in-domain speech recognizer, contextual information, speaker turn information, signal-to-noise ratio estimate and English language detection score per sample. Both available for purchase through ELDA at this http URL. 3) The ATCO2-test-set-1h corpus is a one-hour subset from the original test set corpus, that we are offering for free at this url: https://www.atco2.org/data. We expect the ATCO2 corpus will foster research on robust ASR and NLU not only in the field of ATC communications but also in the general research community.

Code — GitHub repository: https://github.com/idiap/atco2-corpus

This model was fine-tuned on air traffic control data. We don't expect that it keeps the same performance on some others datasets where BERT was pre-trained or fine-tuned.

See Table 6 (page 18) in our paper: ATCO2 corpus: A Large-Scale Dataset for Research on Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding of Air Traffic Control Communications. We described there the data used to fine-tune our NER model.

The snippet of code:

If you use this code for your research, please cite our paper with:

@article{zuluaga2022bertraffic,
  title={BERTraffic: BERT-based Joint Speaker Role and Speaker Change Detection for Air Traffic Control Communications},
  author={Zuluaga-Gomez, Juan and Sarfjoo, Seyyed Saeed and Prasad, Amrutha and others},
  journal={IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), Doha, Qatar},
  year={2022}
  }

and,

@article{zuluaga2022how,
    title={How Does Pre-trained Wav2Vec2. 0 Perform on Domain Shifted ASR? An Extensive Benchmark on Air Traffic Control Communications},
    author={Zuluaga-Gomez, Juan and Prasad, Amrutha and Nigmatulina, Iuliia and Sarfjoo, Saeed and others},
    journal={IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), Doha, Qatar},
    year={2022}
  }

and,

@article{zuluaga2022atco2,
  title={ATCO2 corpus: A Large-Scale Dataset for Research on Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding of Air Traffic Control Communications},
  author={Zuluaga-Gomez, Juan and Vesel{\`y}, Karel and Sz{\"o}ke, Igor and Motlicek, Petr and others},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.04054},
  year={2022}
}

The following hyperparameters were used during training: