Speaker identification based text to audio alignment for an audio retrieval system

We report on an audio retrieval system which lets Internet users efficiently access a large audio database containing recordings of the proceedings of the United States House of Representatives. The audio has been temporally aligned to text transcripts of the proceedings (which are manually generated by the U.S. Government) using a novel method based on speaker identification. Speaker sequence and approximate timing information is extracted from the text transcript and used to constrain a Viterbi alignment of speaker models to the observed audio. Speakers are modeled by computing Gaussian statistics of cepstral coefficients extracted from samples of each person’s speech. The speaker identification is used to locate speaker transition points in the audio which are then linked to corresponding speaker transitions in the text transcript. The alignment system has been successfully integrated into a World Wide Web based search and browse system as an experimental service on the Internet.