GridNews: A distributed automatic Greek broadcast transcription system

In this paper, a distributed system storing and retrieving broadcast news data recorded from the Greek television is presented. These multimodal data are processed in a grid computational environment interconnecting distributed data storage and processing subsystems. The innovative element of this system is the implementation of the signal processing algorithms in this grid environment, offering additional flexibility and computational power. Among the developed signal processing modules are: the Segmentor, cutting up the original videos into shorter ones, the classifier, recognizing whether these short videos contain speech or not, the Greek large-vocabulary speech recognizer, transcribing speech into written text, and finally the text search engine and the video retriever. All the processed data are stored and retrieved in geographically distributed storage elements. A user-friendly, Web-based interface is developed, facilitating the transparent import and storage of new multimodal data, their off-line processing and finally, their search and retrieval.