Publication Details

Automated Interpretation of Air Traffic Control Communication: The Journey from Spoken Words to a Deeper Understanding of the Meaning

KLEINERT Matthias, HELMKE Hartmut, SHETTY Shruthi, OHNEISER Oliver, EHR Heiko, PRASAD Amrutha, MOTLÍČEK Petr and HARFMANN Julia. Automated Interpretation of Air Traffic Control Communication: The Journey from Spoken Words to a Deeper Understanding of the Meaning. In: Proceedings of DASC 2021. San Antonio, Texas: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2021, pp. 1-9. ISBN 978-1-6654-3420-1. Available from: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9594387
Czech title
Automatická interpretace komunikace v řízení letového provozu: cesta od mluvených slov k hlubšímu porozumění významu
Type
conference paper
Language
english
Authors
Kleinert Matthias (DLR)
Helmke Hartmut (DLR)
Shetty Shruthi (DLR)
Ohneiser Oliver (DLR)
Ehr Heiko (DLR)
Prasad Amrutha (DCGM FIT BUT)
Motlíček Petr, Ing., Ph.D. (IDIAP)
Harfmann Julia (NATS)
URL
Keywords

air traffic control, ATC command ontology, command extraction, language understanding, command recognition rate, JSON

Abstract

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.

Published
2021
Pages
1-9
Proceedings
Proceedings of DASC 2021
Conference
2021 IEEE/AIAA 40th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), San Antonio, TX, USA, US
ISBN
978-1-6654-3420-1
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Place
San Antonio, Texas, US
DOI
10.1109/DASC52595.2021.9594387
UT WoS
000739652600089
EID Scopus
2-s2.0-85122836556
BibTeX 
@INPROCEEDINGS{FITPUB12683,
   author = "Matthias Kleinert and Hartmut Helmke and Shruthi Shetty and Oliver Ohneiser and Heiko Ehr and Amrutha Prasad and Petr Motl\'{i}\v{c}ek and Julia Harfmann",
   title = "Automated Interpretation of Air Traffic Control Communication: The Journey from Spoken Words to a Deeper Understanding of the Meaning",
   pages = "1--9",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of DASC 2021",
   year = 2021,
   location = "San Antonio, Texas, US",
   publisher = "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers",
   ISBN = "978-1-6654-3420-1",
   doi = "10.1109/DASC52595.2021.9594387",
   language = "english",
   url = "https://www.fit.vut.cz/research/publication/12683"
}
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