SSCS'10 : Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Workshop on Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech

The spoken word is a valuable source of semantic information. Techniques that exploit the spoken word by making use of speech recognition or spoken audio analysis hold clear potential for improving multimedia search. Nonetheless, speech technology remains underexploited by systems that provide access to spoken audio or video with a speech track. Indexing the spoken audio produced by speakers engaging in conversation or otherwise speaking spontaneously is particularly challenging. The challenges arise due to the wide variability and highly unstructured nature of unplanned, informal speech. Development of approaches that can effectively exploit the semantic content of spontaneous, conversational speech requires integration of speech recognition, audio processing, multimedia analysis and information retrieval. The SSCS workshop series is devoted to providing a forum where scientists engaged in spoken content retrieval research at the intersection of these disciplines can meet, present and discuss recent research results and also formulate a common vision on the future of spoken content retrieval. The research papers presented at SSCS 2010 cluster around topics that are central for spoken content retrieval. Two papers focus on specific indexing techniques applied to spontaneous speech: speaker role recognition and concept detection. Two papers treat Spoken Term Detection, addressing the challenge of terms that cannot be indexed using conventional approaches since they are not contained in the speech recognizer vocabulary (i.e., the so-called Out-Of-Vocabulary problem). Finally, three papers are devoted to topics related to the automatic segmentation of spontaneous conversational content and deal with issues involving the combination of automatic segmentation and information retrieval. SSCS 2010 continues the tradition of past years by including a demonstration session that allows hands-on interaction with systems implementing state-of-the-art approaches to spoken content retrieval. Five demonstration papers give the details of the systems presented. SSCS 2010 includes a number of presentations by invited speakers who address topics related to the user perspective on spoken content retrieval and to domains that are anticipated to give rise to future issues faced by scientists working in the field.