THE CAMBRIDGE MULTIMEDIA DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL (MDR) PROJECT : SUMMARY OF EXPERIMENTS
K. Sparck Jones, P. Jourlin, S.E. Johnson & P.C. Woodland
July 2001
This report summarises the experimental work done under the Multimedia Document Retrieval (MDR) project at Cambridge from 1997-2000, with selected illustrations. The focus is primarily on retrieval studies, and on speech tests directly related to retrieval, not on speech recognition itself. The report draws on the many and varied tests done during the project, but also presents a new series of results designed to compare strategies across as many different data sets as possible by using consistent system parameter settings.
The project tests demonstrate that retrieval from files of audio news material transcribed using a state of the art speech recognition system can match the reference level defined by human transcriptions; and that expansion techniques, especially when applied to queries, can be very effective means for improving basic search performance.
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