Automatic audio archiving system for panel discussions

We present an automatic audio archiving system suitable for panel discussions. In our archive framework, audio data, speech transcription, speaker and content based indices are integrated in order to realize efficient archive browsing. Speaker indexing is performed in a totally unsupervised manner. The speaker information is also used for enhancing the automatic speech recognition system. These results are aligned with audio segments. Moreover we also introduce a novel indexing of utterances based on discourse tags that represent intentions and importance of utterances. A discourse tagger combining rule based and statistical methods is developed to automatically generate high-level indices. Finally, these results are combined and encoded using an MPEG-7 framework, resulting in highly portable archives.