Retrieval of broadcast news documents with the THISL system

This paper describes a spoken document retrieval system, combining the ABBOT large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) system developed by Cambridge University, Sheffield University and SoftSound, and the PRISE information retrieval engine developed by NIST. The system was constructed to enable us to participate in the TREC 6 Spoken Document Retrieval experimental evaluation. Our key aims in this work were to produce a complete system for the SDR task, to investigate the effect of a word error rate of 30-50% on retrieval performance and to investigate the integration of LVCSR and word spotting in a retrieval task.