Recent research efforts on spoken document retrieval have tried to overcome the low quality of 1-best automatic speech recognition transcripts, especially in the case of conversational speech, by using statistics derived from speech lattices containing multiple transcription hypotheses as output by a speech recognizer. We present a method for lattice-based spoken document retrieval based on a statistical n -gram modeling approach to information retrieval. In this statistical lattice-based retrieval (SLBR) method, a smoothed statistical model is estimated for each document from the expected counts of words given the information in a lattice, and the relevance of each document to a query is measured as a probability under such a model. We investigate the efficacy of our method under various parameter settings of the speech recognition and lattice processing engines, using the Fisher English Corpus of conversational telephone speech. Experimental results show that our method consistently achieves better retrieval performance than using only the 1-best transcripts in statistical retrieval, outperforms a recently proposed lattice-based vector space retrieval method, and also compares favorably with a lattice-based retrieval method based on the Okapi BM25 model.

Recent efforts on the task of spoken document retrieval (SDR) have made use of speech lattices: speech lattices contain information about alternative speech transcription hypotheses other than the 1-best transcripts, and this information can improve retrieval accuracy by overcoming recognition errors present in the 1-best transcription. In this paper, we look at using lattices for the query-by-example spoken document retrieval task - retrieving documents from a speech corpus, where the queries are themselves in the form of complete spoken documents (query exemplars). We extend a previously proposed method for SDR with short queries to the query-by-example task. Specifically, we use a retrieval method based on statistical modeling: we compute expected word counts from document and query lattices, estimate statistical models from these counts, and compute relevance scores as divergences between these models. Experimental results on a speech corpus of conversational English show that the use of statistics from lattices for both documents and query exemplars results in better retrieval accuracy than using only 1-best transcripts for either documents, or queries, or both. In addition, we investigate the effect of stop word removal which further improves retrieval accuracy. To our knowledge, our work is the first to have used a lattice-based approach to query-by-example spoken document retrieval.