Processing Broadcast Audio for Information Access

This paper addresses recent progress in speaker-independent, large vocabulary, continuous speech recognition, which has opened up a wide range of near and mid-term applications. One rapidly expanding application area is the processing of broadcast audio for information access. At LIMSI, broadcast news transcription systems have been developed for English, French, German, Mandarin and Portuguese, and systems for other languages are under development. Audio indexation must take into account the specificities of audio data, such as needing to deal with the continuous data stream and an imperfect word transcription. Some near-term applications areas are audio data mining, selective dissemination of information and media monitoring.