Spoken content retrieval: Searching spontaneous conversational speech

The second workshop on Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech (SSCS 2008) was held in Singapore on July 24, 2008 in conjunction with the 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference. The goal of the workshop was to bring the speech community and the information retrieval community together. The forum was designed to be conducive to the close interaction and the intense discussion necessary to promote fusion of these fields into a single discipline with a concerted vision of spoken content retrieval. At the workshop, talks and posters were presented covering a wide range of topics including vocabulary independent search, spoken term detection, combination of models/indexes, use of speech recognition lattices for search, segmentation, temporal analysis, benchmarking, exploitation of prosody, speech surrogates for user interfaces and multi-language collections. Demonstrations of speech-based retrieval systems from a variety of application domains introduced a strong practical emphasis into the workshop program. The workshop concluded with a panel discussion, whose goal it was to identify future research directions for speech retrieval. Among the important challenges identified during the panel discussions were: dealing with large scale multimedia collections, representing audio/video content effectively in the user interface, focusing on perfecting the component technologies on which speech retrieval systems are based, and developing systems and approaches that will enable users (both content seekers and content providers) to actively create their own speech search applications or contribute to the indexability of their content.