Towards An Integrated Approach For Spoken Document Retrieval

This paper presents a novel approach to spoken document retrieval where the speech recognition and information retrieval components are more tightly integrated. This is done by developing new recognizer and retrieval models where the interface between the two components is better matched and the component goals are consistent with the overall goal of the combined system. Experiments on radio news data show that the integrated approach can improve performance by 28% over a baseline system. 1. INTRODUCTION Spoken document retrieval (SDR) is the task of automatically indexing and then retrieving relevant items from a large collection of recorded speech messages in response to a user specified natural language text query. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to SDR where the speech recognition and information retrieval components are more tightly integrated. This new approach represents a step towards moving away from the conventional method of having a cascade of independently ope..