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.