AT&T at TREC-7 SDR Track

AT&T participated in the Spoken Document Retrieval (SDR) track of TREC-7. Our speech retrieval system uses modern Information Retrieval (IR) methods in conjunction with in-house automatic speech recognition. The novel feature of our TREC-7 work is the use of document expansion to reduce the performance loss due to ASR errors. Results show that retrieval from automatic transcriptions of speech is quite competitive with doing retrieval from human transcriptions. Our experiments indicate that document expansion can be used to further improve retrieval from automatic transcripts. This paper presents some analysis of document expansion in context of the TREC-7 SDR track task.