Abstract

Spoken content retrieval (SCR) has been the focus of various research initiatives for more then 20 years. Early work focused on development of small private test collections in the mid-1990s. This was followed by the first open benchmark evaluations of SCR in the spoken document retrieval (SDR) at TREC -6-9. The end of which saw SDR declared a largely solved problem. However, this soon found to be a premature conclusion relating to controlled recordings of professional news content and overlooking many of the potential challenges of searching more complex spoken content. Subsequent research has focused on more challenging tasks such as search of interview recordings and semi-professional internet content.

This talk will begin by reviewing early work in SDR , explaining its successes and limitations, it will then move to outline research exploring SCR for more challenging tasks, such as identifying relevant elements in long spoken recordings such as meetings and presentations, provide a detailed analysis of the characteristics of retrieval behaviour of spoken content elements when indexed using manual and automatic transcripts, and finally conclude with a summary of the challenges of delivering effective SCR for complex spoken content.