Multimedia with a speech track: searching spontaneous conversational speech

After two successful years at SIGIR in 2007 and 2008, the third workshop on Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech (SSCS 2009) was held conjunction with the ACM Multimedia 2009. The goal of the SSCS series is to serve as a forum that brings together the disciplines that collaborate on spoken content retrieval, including information retrieval, speech recognition and multimedia analysis. Multimedia collections often contain a speech track, but in many cases it is ignored or not fully exploited for information retrieval. Currently, spoken content retrieval research is expanding beyond highly-conventionalized domains such as broadcast news in to domains involving speech that is produced spontaneously and in conversational settings. Such speech is characterized by wide variability of speaking styles, subject matter and recording conditions. The work presented at SSCS 2009 included techniques for searching meetings, interviews, telephone conversations, podcasts and spoken annotations. The work encompassed a large range of approaches including using subword units, exploiting dialogue structure, fusing retrieval models, modeling topics and integrating visual features. Taken in sum, the workshop demonstrated the high potential of new ideas emerging in the area of speech search and also reinforced the need for concentrated research devoted to the classic challenges of spoken content retrieval, many of which remain yet unsolved.