The spoken web search task at MediaEval 2012

In this paper, we describe the “Spoken Web Search” Task, which was held as part of the 2012 MediaEval benchmark evaluation campaign. The purpose of this task was to perform audio search with audio input in four languages, with very few resources being available. Continuing in the spirit of the 2011 SpokenWeb Search Task, which used speech from four Indian languages, the 2012 data was taken from the LWAZI corpus, to provide even more diversity and allow for a task that will allow both zero resource “pattern matching” approaches and “speech recognition” based approaches to participate. In this paper, we summarize the results from several independent systems, developed by nine teams, analyze their performance, and provide directions for future research.