[GitHub] simoncorstonoliver opened a new pull request #9060: Remove defunct demo

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simoncorstonoliver opened a new pull request #9060: Remove defunct demo
URL: https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/pull/9060
 
 
   I have spent ~4 hours working through the demo trying to get it working. It has problems so severe that I don?t think it?s worth trying to salvage it. This example might make a good blog entry for people who are thoroughly versed in Kaldi, an Open Source automatic speech recognition (ASR) project, and who are interested in an MXNet wrapper for it but does not stand alone as an introductory example to speech recognition suitable for inclusion in the MXNet repo. Alternatively, an ASR expert could perhaps rework this example and resubmit it if it illustrated general MXNet concepts.
   
   Specific criticisms that lead me to propose removing the demo altogether:
   
   - Depends on Kaldi which is a bear to install and compile (but I got there in the end).
   - The example includes a Python wrapper around Kaldi which does not compile. Editing the makefile to remove the link dependency on ../thread/kaldi-thread.a allowed it to compile but I have no idea if the result will work as intended.
   - The discussion of preparing data gives no hint of where you would download compatible data or transcripts. It tells you to run Kaldi scripts that barf and ask where your Fisher transcripts are.
   - The example has vague instructions to go read the Kaldi docs but doesn't even give a title or topic that you should go looking for.
   - The tutorial is full of acronyms that appear to have ASR-specific meanings that are never explained and that a user of MXNet would not reasonably be expected to know e.g. AMI does not mean "Amazon Machine Image". Similarly TIMIT is a speech corpus.
   
   

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