Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda

Recorded interviews form a rich basis for scholarly inquiry. Examples include oral histories, community memory projects, and interviews conducted for broadcast media. Emerging technologies offer the potential to radically transform the way in which recorded interviews are made accessible, but this vision will demand substantial investments from a broad range of research communities. This article reviews the present state of practice for making recorded interviews available and the state-of-the-art for key component technologies. A large number of important research issues are identified, and from that set of issues, a coherent research agenda is proposed

Automated speech and audio analysis for semantic access to multimedia

The deployment and integration of audio processing tools can enhance the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and as a consequence, improve the effectiveness of conceptual access tools. This paper overviews the various ways in which automatic speech and audio analysis can contribute to increased granularity of automatically extracted metadata. A number of techniques will be presented, including the alignment of speech and text resources, large vocabulary speech recognition, key word spotting and speaker classification. The applicability of techniques will be discussed from a media crossing perspective. The added value of the techniques and their potential contribution to the content value chain will be illustrated by the description of two (complementary) demonstrators for browsing broadcast news archives

Hybrid robust deep and shallow semantic processing for creativity support in document production

The research performed in the DeepThought project (http://www.project-deepthought.net) aims at demonstrating the potential of deep linguistic processing if added to existing shallow methods that ensure robustness. Classical information retrieval is extended by high precision concept indexing and relation detection. We use this approach to demonstrate the feasibility of three ambitious applications, one of which is a tool for creativity support in document production and collective brainstorming. This application is described in detail in this paper. Common to all three applications, and the basis for their development is a platform for integrated linguistic processing. This platform is based on a generic software architecture that combines multiple NLP components and on robust minimal recursive semantics (RMRS) as a uniform representation language

Multimedia information technology and the annotation of video

The state of the art in multimedia information technology has not progressed to the point where a single solution is available to meet all reasonable needs of documentalists and users of video archives. In general, we do not have an optimistic view of the usability of new technology in this domain, but digitization and digital power can be expected to cause a small revolution in the area of video archiving. The volume of data leads to two views of the future: on the pessimistic side, overload of data will cause lack of annotation capacity, and on the optimistic side, there will be enough data from which to learn selected concepts that can be deployed to support automatic annotation. At the threshold of this interesting era, we make an attempt to describe the state of the art in technology. We sample the progress in text, sound, and image processing, as well as in machine learning

Towards Affordable Disclosure of Spoken Word Archives

This paper presents and discusses ongoing work aiming at affordable disclosure of real-world spoken word archives in general, and in particular of a collection of recorded interviews with Dutch survivors of World War II concentration camp Buchenwald. Given such collections, the least we want to be able to provide is search at different levels and a flexible way of presenting results. Strategies for automatic annotation based on speech recognition – supporting e.g., within-document search– are outlined and discussed with respect to the Buchenwald interview collection. In addition, usability aspects of the spoken word search are discussed on the basis of our experiences with the online Buchenwald web portal. It is concluded that, although user feedback is generally fairly positive, automatic annotation performance is still far from satisfactory, and requires additional research

An Analysis of the Performances of the CasEN Named Entities Recognition System in the Ester2 Evaluation Campaign

8 pagesIn this paper, we present a detailed and critical analysis of the behaviour of the CasEN named entity recognition system during the French Ester2 evaluation campaign. In this project, CasEN has been confronted with the task of detecting and categorizing named entities in manual and automatic transcriptions of radio broadcastings. At first, we give a general presentation of the Ester2 campaign. Then, we describe our system, based on transducers. Next, we depict how systems were evaluated during this campaign and we report the main official results. Afterwards, we investigate in details the influence of some annotation biases which have significantly affected the estimation of the performances of systems. At last, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the effective errors of the CasEN system, providing us with some useful indications about phenomena that gave rise to errors (e.g. metonymy, encapsulation, detection of right boundaries) and are as many challenges for named entity recognition systems