Spoken document understanding and organization

Spoken documents (or associated multimedia content) are in fact better understood and reorganized in a way that retrieval/browsing can be performed easily. For example, they are now in the form of short paragraphs, properly organized in some hierarchical visual presentation with titles/summaries/topic labels as references for retrieval and browsing. The retrieval can be performed based on the full content, the summaries/titles/topic labels, or both. In this article, this is referred to as spoken document understanding and organization for efficient retrieval/browsing applications. The purpose of this article is to present a concise, comprehensive, and integrated overview of related areas in a unified context of spoken document understanding and organization for efficient retrieval/browsing applications. In addition, we present an initial prototype system we developed at National Taiwan University as a new example of integrating the various technologies and functionalities.