Week 9: Closer and Closer to the Symposium

Hello there! Week 9 was less eventful than previous weeks, focused on preparation for the Senior Project Symposium and preparing the final project. I continued my readings for last-minute tweaks, specifically on word morphology. 

At this stage, I have already completed my initial draft of the Introduction with my internal advisor, as well as developed some results graphs. Before writing again, I improved the scripts for result generation, starting with the final comparison across BERTScore F1 and fastText cosine ( explained in previous blogs) as my main indicator of protocol performance. I summarized my general findings and created a graphic to represent them. The graphic indicates a strong ability to transcribe and translate the meaning of spoken dialogue. I also improved the generated graphs of MUSE cosine scores across file and live transcription methods, particularly the organization of bars alongside empty columns (empty scores due to flaws such as skipping over words and heavy noise influence in inputs).

As I was going through my results, one thing was clear: the protocol shows promise but has a long way to go. This came through as I finalized tables detailing a comprehensive report of METEOR/BLEU results across both Phases. I mentioned how these scores were both extremely low due to the captured flaws as well as their prioritization of word-to-word accuracy compared to the human-translated text. However, I didn’t notice that one video showed extremely variable results compared to the rest: the APEX interview. It was the only captured video with a crisp set of dialogue. All external noise in the other stored videos was mixed with the dialogue, making it difficult to separate. However, having the other interviews was a stress test for me to notice imperfections and where to take this project further.

Apart from analyzing the results, I built scripts for figure design, especially my main methodology figure that summarizes all the steps I’ve covered at this point. I took the previously stored tables containing raw translated transcripts from both phases and added them to my paper as a separate appendix. The last portion of my week was organizing all this content into a structured Overleaf document and completing drafts of every section in the paper. During my product preparation, I continued retesting every step to update the results to the product’s strongest performance across every thirty-second segment. This way, I can focus all of Week 10 towards poster design, refining the paper itself, and preparing the presentation for the symposium. Although the main design portion is complete, I am extremely happy that I was able to reach each of my initial objectives while having a clear idea of where to take this project.

Thanks for reading my blog and see you for the last week!