Experiments in spoken document retrieval

• Published in: Information processing & management Vol. 32; no. 4; pp. 399 - 417
• Main Authors: Sparck Jones, K., Jones, G.J.F., Foote, J.T., Young, S.J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Elsevier Ltd 01-07-1996; Elsevier Science; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Electronic mail systems; Exact sciences and technology; Futures (of Society); Information and communication sciences; Information Retrieval; Information retrieval systems; Information retrieval systems. Information and document management system; Information science. Documentation; Multimedia; Multimedia computer applications; Multimedia Materials; Online information retrieval; Problems; Sciences and techniques of general use; Search Strategies; Searching; Speech; Speech Recognition; Studies; Tables (Data); Voice Mail; Voice recognition; Multimedia; System evaluation; Word oriented; Implementation; Extension; Documentation data processing; Project; Perspective; Document retrieval system; Test; Message handling; Speech recognition; Experimentation; Probabilistic model; Recent studies; Application
• ISSN: 0306-4573; 1873-5371
• DOI: 10.1016/0306-4573(95)00077-1

This paper describes experiments in the retrieval of spoken documents in multimedia systems. Speech documents pose a particular problem for retrieval since their words as well as contents are unknown. The work reported addresses this problem, for a video mail application, by combining state of the art speech recognition with established document retrieval technologies so as to provide an effective and efficient retrieval tool. Tests with a small spoken message collection show that retrieval precision for the spoken file can reach 90% of that obtained when the same file is used, as a benchmark, in text transcription form.