# Transcript Cleanup Standard

Applies to any lecture transcript cleanup pass, in any course or discipline. An editor, human or AI, receives a raw ASR transcript and returns a cleaned transcript. This document defines what "cleaned" means and what it does not mean.

## Core Constraint

Do not change meaning or structure. Preserve sentence order and paragraph order as they appear in the source. Add no substantive content. Remove no substantive content. A cleanup pass fixes how something is written, not what was said.

If a sentence names a case, a statute, a formula, a date, a person, or a number, that content survives the pass. When in doubt, keep the word as transcribed rather than delete it.

## Generic Rules

**Spelling.** Fix misspelled words. Use standard dictionary spelling unless the course glossary below specifies a different canonical form.

**Capitalization.** Capitalize proper nouns (people, places, organizations, case names) and any domain term the course glossary marks as capitalized. Capitalize "Module" only when it is followed by a number: "module eight" becomes "Module 8." Leave "module" lowercase on its own.

**Website text.** Spell out spoken web addresses the way they appear in print: "c a dot gov" becomes "CA.gov." Match the domain's real casing where known.

**Punctuation.** Add punctuation only where the sentence needs it to read correctly. Skip decorative punctuation. Do not restructure a sentence just to justify a punctuation choice.

**Numbers.** Spelled-out numbers become numerals: "fifty thousand" becomes "50000" as an intermediate form. Format currency with a dollar sign and thousands separators: "1200 dollars" becomes "$1,200." Exception: fixed formal phrases that conventionally use words stay as words ("a one-time payment," "Chapter Eleven," or a case name that spells out a number as part of its proper title).

**Contractions.** Expand informal contractions: "gonna" becomes "going to," "wanna" becomes "want to," "gotta" becomes "got to." Keep standard contractions ("don't," "it's," "we'll") as spoken.

**Quotations.** Preserve quoted material as is, including any phrasing the speaker is quoting from someone else. Do not clean up a quotation's internal wording.

**Dashes.** Do not introduce em dashes or en dashes. Use commas or periods instead.

## ASR Error Correction, Conservative

Automatic speech recognition mishears things in predictable ways. Fix the following, conservatively:

- **Homophones**: a word substituted for a same-sounding word ("there" for "their," "site" for "cite").
- **Mistranscribed proper nouns**: a name transcribed close to how it sounds but spelled wrong.
- **Wrongly split or merged words**: "a synchronous" for "asynchronous," "cannotbe" for "cannot be."
- **Low-confidence guesses**: a nonsense word or phrase standing in for a real term.

Correct these toward the most probable term for the course's domain. Do not guess past reasonable certainty. If two candidate corrections are both plausible and nothing in the sentence settles which one the speaker meant, keep the transcribed word instead of picking one.

**Never delete a name or citation you cannot resolve.** If a case name, statute, or proper noun is garbled and you cannot reconstruct it, leave the closest legible version in place. Deleting it is a bigger error than leaving it imperfect, because deletion destroys evidence a reviewer could otherwise fix. Guessing wrong is recoverable; a missing name is not.

## Course-Specific Glossary

{{COURSE_GLOSSARY}}

Each course supplies its own domain vocabulary and canonical proper-noun spellings here. The editor uses this course's glossary instead of guessing from general knowledge, and instead of a different course's glossary. See `standards/glossaries/README.md` for the format and `standards/glossaries/law-contracts.md` for a worked example. A deterministic verifier, `scripts/verify_transcript_clean.py --glossary PATH`, checks cleaned output against the canonical spellings listed in this section.

## Output Format

Return the cleaned transcript only. Preserve the source's paragraph structure: same number of paragraphs, same order. Do not add notes, flags, brackets, editorial comments, or a summary of changes. The output is the transcript, nothing else.

## Word Count and the Verifier

The verifier reports the out/src word ratio and flags anything below `--min-ratio` (default 0.88). A ratio of 0.90 to 0.95 is normal after an editor removes ASR stutter, for example "There's a there's a breach" becoming "There's a breach", and a transcript full of false starts can reach 0.85 with no content loss. Inspect the flagged file before you lower the threshold, and treat any ratio below 0.80 as deleted content until you confirm otherwise.
