The impact of language models and loss functions on repair disfluency detection

Unrehearsed spoken language often contains disfluencies. In order to correctly interpret a spoken utterance, any such disfluencies must be identified and removed or otherwise dealt with. Operating on transcripts of speech which contain disfluencies, we study the effect of language model and loss function on the performance of a linear reranker that rescores the 25-best output of a noisychannel model. We show that language models trained on large amounts of non-speech data improve performance more than a languagemodel trained on amoremodest amount of speech data, and that optimising f-score rather than log loss improves disfluency detection performance. Our approach uses a log-linear reranker, operating on the top n analyses of a noisy channel model. We use large language models, introduce new features into this reranker and examine different optimisation strategies. We obtain a disfluency detection f-scores of 0.838 which improves upon the current state-of-theart.