Intelligent checking model of Chinese radiotelephony read-backs in civil aviation air traffic control

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and NASA technical reports indicate that the misunderstanding in radiotelephony communications is a primary causal factor associated with operation errors, and a sizable proportion of operation errors lead to read-back errors. We introduce deep learning method to solve this problem and propose a new semantic checking model based on Long Short-Time Memory network (LSTM) for intelligent read-back error checking. A mean-pooling layer is added to the traditional LSTM, so as to utilize the information obtained by all the hidden activation vectors, and also to improve the robustness of the semantic vector extracted by LSTM. A MultiLayer Perceptron (MLP) layer, which can maintain the information of different regions in the concatenated vectors obtained by the mean-pooling layer, is applied instead of traditional similarity function in the new model to express the semantic similarity of the read-back pairs quantitatively. The K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifier is used to verify whether the read-back pairs are consistent in semantics according to the output of MLP layer. Extensive experiments are conducted and the results show that the proposed model is more effective and more robust than the traditional checking model to verify the semantic consistency of read-backs automatically. Keywords: Air traffic control, Chinese radiotelephony read-backs, LSTM, Mean pooling, MLP, Semantic checking