Automatic topic identification in multimedia broadcast data

This paper presents a system that automatically scans multimedia data like TV or radio broadcasts for the presence of specific topics and, whenever topics of users´ interests are detected, alerts the related user. Our current work on the three main modules of the system is shown. (1) The speech recognition system (with 18.7 % WER) is already among the most advanced German broadcast speech recognition systems. (2) The innovative topic identification approach, which is especially designed to work on the output of a speech recognizer, is compared to a standard text based approach. (3) The topic segmentation module has a good performance detecting not only scene cuts or speaker turns, but also real topic boundaries.