The interactive systems labs view4you video indexing system

The recognition of broadcast news is a challenging problem in speech recognition. To achieve the long-term goal of robust, real-time news transcription, several problems have to be overcome, e.g. the variety of acoustic conditions and the unlimited vocabulary. Recently, a number of sites have been working on content-addressable multi-media information sources. In the presented paper, we focus on extending this work towards a multi-lingual environment, where queries and multimedia documents may appear in multiple languages. In cooperation with the Informedia project at CMU [4], we attempt to provide cross-lingual access to German and Serbo-Croatian newscasts. 1. THE VIEW4YOU SYSTEM In the View4You system, German and Serbocroatian public newscasts are recorded daily using standard consumer electronics equipment. The newscasts are automatically segmented and an index is created for each of the segments by means of automatic speech recognition. The user can query the system in natural language. The system returns a list of segments which is sorted by relevance with respect to the user query. By selecting a segment, the user can watch the corresponding part of the news show on his or her computer screen. In this work, we give an overview over the three main parts of the View4You system, namely the segmenter, the speech recognizer, and the information retrieval engine.