Abstract for sparckjones_cltr517

Technical Report 517, Cambridge University Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FD, England, July 2001

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.


| (ftp:) sparckjones_cltr517.ps.gz | (http:) sparckjones_cltr517.ps.gz | (ftp:) sparckjones_cltr517.pdf | (http:) sparckjones_cltr517.pdf | (http:) sparckjones_cltr517.html/ |

If you have difficulty viewing files that end '.gz', which are gzip compressed, then you may be able to find tools to uncompress them at the gzip web site.

If you have difficulty viewing files that are in PostScript, (ending '.ps' or '.ps.gz'), then you may be able to find tools to view them at the gsview web site.

We have attempted to provide automatically generated PDF copies of documents for which only PostScript versions have previously been available. These are clearly marked in the database - due to the nature of the automatic conversion process, they are likely to be badly aliased when viewed at default resolution on screen by acroread.