An interactive timeline for speech database browsing

Speech databases lack efficient interfaces to explore information along time. We introduce an interactive timeline that helps the user in browsing an audio stream on a large time scale and recontextualize targeted information. Time can be explored at different granularities using synchronized scales. We try to take advantage of automatic transcription to generate a conceptual structure of the database. The timeline is annotated with two elements to reflect the information distribution relevant to a user need. Information density is computed using an information retrieval model and displayed as a continuous shade on the timeline whereas anchorage points are expected to provide a stronger structure and to guide the user through his exploration. These points are generated using an extractive summarization algorithm. We present a prototype implementing the interactive timeline to browse broadcast news recordings.