Robust audio indexing for Dutch spoken-word collections

Abstract—Whereas the growth of storage capacity is in accordance with widely acknowledged predictions, the possibilities to index and access the archives created is lagging behind. This is especially the case in the oral history domain and much of the rich content in these collections runs the risk to remain inaccessible for lack of robust search technologies. This paper addresses the history and development of robust audio indexing technology for searching Dutch spoken-word collections and compares Dutch audio indexing in the well-studied broadcast news domain with an oral-history case-study. It is concluded that despite significant advances in Dutch audio indexing technology and demonstrated applicability in several domains, further research is indispensable for successful automatic disclosure of spoken-word collections

MIRACLE Retrieval Experiments with East Asian Languages

This paper describes the participation of MIRACLE in NTCIR 2005 CLIR task. Although our group has a strong background and long expertise in Computational Linguistics and Information Retrieval applied to European languages and using Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, this was our first attempt on East Asian languages. Our main goal was to study the particularities and distinctive characteristics of Japanese, Chinese and Korean, specially focusing on the similarities and differences with European languages, and carry out research on CLIR tasks which include those languages. The basic idea behind our participation in NTCIR is to test if the same familiar linguisticbased techniques may also applicable to East Asian languages, and study the necessary adaptations

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

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

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

From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics

Computers understand very little of the meaning of human language. This profoundly limits our ability to give instructions to computers, the ability of computers to explain their actions to us, and the ability of computers to analyse and process text. Vector space models (VSMs) of semantics are beginning to address these limits. This paper surveys the use of VSMs for semantic processing of text. We organize the literature on VSMs according to the structure of the matrix in a VSM. There are currently three broad classes of VSMs, based on term-document, word-context, and pair-pattern matrices, yielding three classes of applications. We survey a broad range of applications in these three categories and we take a detailed look at a specific open source project in each category. Our goal in this survey is to show the breadth of applications of VSMs for semantics, to provide a new perspective on VSMs for those who are already familiar with the area, and to provide pointers into the literature for those who are less familiar with the field

Multimedia search without visual analysis: the value of linguistic and contextual information

This paper addresses the focus of this special issue by analyzing the potential contribution of linguistic content and other non-image aspects to the processing of audiovisual data. It summarizes the various ways in which linguistic content analysis contributes to enhancing the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and, as a consequence, to improving the effectiveness of conceptual media access tools. A number of techniques are presented, including the time-alignment of textual resources, audio and speech processing, content reduction and reasoning tools, and the exploitation of surface features

TwNC: a Multifaceted Dutch News Corpus

This contribution describes the Twente News Corpus (TwNC), a multifaceted corpus for Dutch that is being deployed in a number of NLP research projects among which tracks within the Dutch national research programme MultimediaN, the NWO programme CATCH, and the Dutch-Flemish programme STEVIN.\ud \ud The development of the corpus started in 1998 within a predecessor project DRUID and has currently a size of 530M words. The text part has been built from texts of four different sources: Dutch national newspapers, television subtitles, teleprompter (auto-cues) files, and both manually and automatically generated broadcast news transcripts along with the broadcast news audio. TwNC plays a crucial role in the development and evaluation of a wide range of tools and applications for the domain of multimedia indexing, such as large vocabulary speech recognition, cross-media indexing, cross-language information retrieval etc. Part of the corpus was fed into the Dutch written text corpus in the context of the Dutch-Belgian STEVIN project D-COI that was completed in 2007. The sections below will describe the rationale that was the starting point for the corpus development; it will outline the cross-media linking approach adopted within MultimediaN, and finally provide some facts and figures about the corpus