Robust talker-independent audio document retrieval

The goal of the video mail retrieval (VMR) project is to integrate state-of-the-art document retrieval methods with speech recognition to yield a robust and efficient retrieval system. The work presented extends VMR towards an open-vocabulary, talker-independent system for retrieving spontaneously-spoken audio and video messages. We present results showing successful retrieval using a standard large-vocabulary (LV) recogniser, despite the lack of a matched language model and vocabulary. We further show that integrating a LV recogniser with conventional word spotting (WS) gives more robust retrieval performance than either method alone. This paper gives details of the message archive used, the speech recognition methodologies, the information retrieval methods, and experimental results.