Semantic access to multimedia content in audiovisual archives is to a large extent dependent on quantity and quality of the metadata, and particularly the content descriptions that are attached to the individual items. However, the manual annotation of collections puts heavy demands on resources. A large number of archives are introducing (semi) automatic annotation techniques for generating and/or enhancing metadata. The NWO funded CATCH-CHOICE project has investigated the extraction of keywords from textual resources related to TV programs to be archived (context documents), in collaboration with the Dutch audiovisual archives, Sound and Vision. This paper investigates the suitability of Automatic Speech Recognition transcripts produced in the CATCH-CHoral project for generating such keywords, which we evaluate against manual annotations of the documents, and against keywords automatically generated from context documents describing the TV programs’ content.

The re-use of spoken word audio collections maintained by audiovisual archives is severely hindered by their generally limited access. The CHoral project, which is part of the CATCH program funded by the Dutch Research Council, aims to provide users of speech archives with online, instead of on-location, access to relevant fragments, instead of full documents. To meet this goal, a spoken document retrieval framework is being developed. In this paper the evaluation efforts undertaken so far to assess and improve various aspects of the framework are presented. These efforts include (i) evaluation of the automatically generated textual representations of the spoken word documents that enable word-based search, (ii) the development of measures to estimate the quality of the textual representations for use in information retrieval, and (iii) studies to establish the potential user groups of the to-be-developed technology, and the first versions of the user interface supporting online access to spoken word collections.