Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies

Speech media, that is, digital audio and video containing spoken content, has blossomed in recent years. Large collections are accruing on the Internet as well as in private and enterprise settings. This growth has motivated extensive research on techniques and technologies that facilitate reliable indexing and retrieval. Spoken content retrieval (SCR) requires the combination of audio and speech processing technologies with methods from information retrieval (IR). SCR research initially investigated planned speech structured in document-like units, but has subsequently shifted focus to more informal spoken content produced spontaneously, outside of the studio and in conversational settings. This survey provides an overview of the field of SCR encompassing component technologies, the relationship of SCR to text IR and automatic speech recognition and user interaction issues. It is aimed at researchers with backgrounds in speech technology or IR who are seeking deeper insight on how these fields are integrated to support research and development, thus addressing the core challenges of SCR

Augmenting conversations through context-aware multimedia retrieval based on speech recognition

Future’s environments will be sensitive and responsive to the presence of people to support them carrying out their everyday life activities, tasks and rituals, in an easy and natural way. Such interactive spaces will use the information and communication technologies to bring the computation into the physical world, in order to enhance ordinary activities of their users. This paper describes a speech-based spoken multimedia retrieval system that can be used to present relevant video-podcast (vodcast) footage, in response to spontaneous speech and conversations during daily life activities. The proposed system allows users to search the spoken content of multimedia files rather than their associated meta-information and let them navigate to the right portion where queried words are spoken by facilitating within-medium searches of multimedia content through a bag-of-words approach. Finally, we have studied the proposed system on different scenarios by using vodcasts in English from various categories, as the targeted multimedia, and discussed how it would enhance people’s everyday life activities by different scenarios including education, entertainment, marketing, news and workplace

Examining and improving the effectiveness of relevance feedback for retrieval of scanned text documents

Important legacy paper documents are digitized and collected in online accessible archives. This enables the preservation, sharing, and significantly the searching of these documents. The text contents of these document images can be transcribed automatically using OCR systems and then stored in an information retrieval system. However, OCR systems make errors in character recognition which have previously been shown to impact on document retrieval behaviour. In particular relevance feedback query-expansion methods, which are often effective for improving electronic text retrieval, are observed to be less reliable for retrieval of scanned document images. Our experimental examination of the effects of character recognition errors on an ad hoc OCR retrieval task demonstrates that, while baseline information retrieval can remain relatively unaffected by transcription errors, relevance feedback via query expansion becomes highly unstable. This paper examines the reason for this behaviour, and introduces novel modifications to standard relevance feedback methods. These methods are shown experimentally to improve the effectiveness of relevance feedback for errorful OCR transcriptions. The new methods combine similar recognised character strings based on term collection frequency and a string edit-distance measure. The techniques are domain independent and make no use of external resources such as dictionaries or training data

Study on phonetic context of Malay syllables towards the development of Malay speech synthesizer [TK7882.S65 H233 2007 f rb].

Pensintesis sebutan Bahasa Melayu telah berkembang daripada teknik pensintesis berparameter (pemodelan penyebutan manusia dan pensintesis berdasarkan formant) kepada teknik pensintesis tidak berparameter (pensintesis sebutan berdasarkan pencantuman). Speech synthesizer has evolved from parametric speech synthesizer (articulatory and formant synthesizer) to non-parametric synthesizer (concatenative synthesizer). Recently, the concatenative speech synthesizer approach is moving towards corpusbased or unit selection technique

Echoes of Persuasion: The Effect of Euphony in Persuasive Communication

While the effect of various lexical, syntactic, semantic and stylistic features have been addressed in persuasive language from a computational point of view, the persuasive effect of phonetics has received little attention. By modeling a notion of euphony and analyzing four datasets comprising persuasive and non-persuasive sentences in different domains (political speeches, movie quotes, slogans and tweets), we explore the impact of sounds on different forms of persuasiveness. We conduct a series of analyses and prediction experiments within and across datasets. Our results highlight the positive role of phonetic devices on persuasion