Subword-based Indexing for a Minimal False Positive Rate

Subword-based Indexing for a Minimal False Positive Rat

Exploration of audiovisual heritage using audio indexing technology

This paper discusses audio indexing tools that have been implemented for the disclosure of Dutch audiovisual cultural heritage collections. It explains the role of language models and their adaptation to historical settings and the adaptation of acoustic models for homogeneous audio collections. In addition to the benefits of cross-media linking, the requirements for successful tuning and improvement of available tools for indexing the heterogeneous A/V collections from the cultural heritage domain are reviewed. And finally the paper argues that research is needed to cope with the varying information needs for different types of users

Relevance of ASR for the Automatic Generation of Keywords Suggestions for TV programs

Semantic access to multimedia content in audiovisual archives is to a large extent dependent on quantity and quality of the metadata, and particularly the content descriptions that are attached to the individual items. However, given the growing amount of materials that are being created on a daily basis and the digitization of existing analogue collections, the traditional manual annotation of collections puts heavy demands on resources, especially for large audiovisual archives. One way to address this challenge, is to introduce (semi) automatic annotation techniques for generating and/or enhancing metadata. The NWO funded CATCH-CHOICE project has investigated the extraction of keywords form textual resources related to the TV programs to be archived (context documents), in collaboration with the Dutch audiovisual archives, Sound and Vision. Besides the descriptions of the programs published by the broadcasters on their Websites, Automatic Speech Transcription (ASR) techniques from the CATCH-CHoral project, also provide textual resources that might be relevant for suggesting keywords. This paper investigates the suitability of ASR for generating such keywords, which we evaluate against manual annotations of the documents and against keywords automatically generated from context documents

Деякі аспекти дослідження стародавніх українських цитр

The article is dedicated to some aspects of origin of vertical medieval Ukrainian zithers. Later they became one of the prototypes of modern bandura (Ukrainian musical instrument)

Radio Oranje: Enhanced Access to a Historical Spoken Word Collection

Access to historical audio collections is typically very restricted:\ud content is often only available on physical (analog) media and the\ud metadata is usually limited to keywords, giving access at the level\ud of relatively large fragments, e.g., an entire tape. Many spoken\ud word heritage collections are now being digitized, which allows the\ud introduction of more advanced search technology. This paper presents\ud an approach that supports online access and search for recordings of\ud historical speeches. A demonstrator has been built, based on the\ud so-called Radio Oranje collection, which contains radio speeches by\ud the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina that were broadcast during World War II.\ud The audio has been aligned with its original 1940s manual\ud transcriptions to create a time-stamped index that enables the speeches to be\ud searched at the word level. Results are presented together with\ud related photos from an external database

The Lowlands team at TRECVID 2007

In this report we summarize our methods and results for the search tasks in\ud TRECVID 2007. We employ two different kinds of search: purely ASR based and\ud purely concept based search. However, there is not significant difference of the\ud performance of the two systems. Using neighboring shots for the combination of\ud two concepts seems to be beneficial. General preprocessing of queries increased\ud the performance and choosing detector sources helped. However, for all automatic\ud search components we need to perform further investigations

Long-term within-speaker consistency of filled pauses in native and non-native speech

Filled pauses are widely considered as a relatively consistent feature of an individual's speech. However, acoustic consistency has only been observed within single-session recordings. By comparing filled pauses in two recordings made >2.5 years apart, this study investigates within-speaker consistency of the vowels in the filled pauses uh and um, in both first language (L1) Dutch and second language (L2) English, produced by student speakers who are known to converge in other speech features. Results show that despite minor within-speaker differences between languages, the spectral characteristics of filled pauses in L1 and L2 remained stable over time

Browsing and Searching the Spoken Words of Buchenwald Survivors

The ‘Buchenwald’ project is the successor of the ‘Radio Oranje’ project that aimed at the transformation of a set of World War II related mono-media documents –speeches of the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, textual transcripts of the speeches, and a database of WWII related photographs– to an attractive online multimedia presentation of the Queen’s speeches with keyword search functionality [6, 3]. The ‘Buchenwald’ project links up and extends the ‘Radio Oranje’ approach. The goal in the project was to develop a Dutch multimedia information portal on World War II concentration camp Buchenwald1. The portal holds both textual information sources and a video collection of testimonies from 38 Dutch camp survivors with durations between a half and two and a half hours. For each interview, an elaborate description, a speaker profile and a short summary are available

The perceptual development of a British-English phoneme contrast in Dutch adults

How does the perception of a new phoneme contrast develop? In answering this question we consider two hypotheses: i) Acquired Distinctiveness: before learning, differences between and within phoneme categories are hardly discriminable. Through training, the phoneme boundary is learnt. ii) Acquired Similarity: before learning, differences between and within phoneme categories are well discriminated. Through training, only the phoneme boundary remains discriminable. In a pretest-training-posttest design, Dutch adults learnt the British- English pseudowords thif and sif: the first consonant in thif is not a phoneme of Dutch. Between pretest and posttest with materials from one speaker, participants were trained with speech from five other speakers. This forced listeners to form abstract phoneme categories. The results show that trained listeners performed better in the posttest than control listeners. However, in general the control group, who received no training, was difficult to distinguish from the trained listeners. With respect to the research question we found that discrimination levels increased as a result of training