ITR: Information Access to Spoken Documents

Mississippi State University, Mississippi State MS

Investigators

Abstract

This is the first year funding of a four-year continuing award. This project addresses issues relating to the construction of a system for answering questions about information contained in a collection of spoken documents. It focuses on the key scientific questions that arise in the integration of prosodic information, speech recognition and parsing in the retrieval of spoken documents, but will not involve implementation of a complete system. There are four key themes in the research: utilizing parsing in information retrieval; integrating prosodic information in parsing spoken language; incorporating uncertainty in parsing to handle speech recognition errors; and improvements to speech recognition of spontaneous speech. All components will share a probabilistic formulation, thereby affording a systematic framework for integrating the information they provide. A primary project goal is to better understand how information provided by one of these components might be effectively utilized to improve he performance of other components in the information retrieval task. Absent a corpus tailored to the information retrieval topics the PI and his team plan to study, progress will be evaluated using existing annotated text collections such as Switchboard and LDC's Broadcast News collections. The work will lead to advances in information extraction from telephone messages, conversations, university lectures, or from any text (such as encyclopedias), and should potentially serve as the basis for a sorely needed sophisticated web browser technology and data mining applications, which in turn would enable people who currently under-utilize computers to become full participants in the information revolution.