The Telefonica Research Spoken Web Search System for MediaEval 2013

In this paper we describe the system proposed by Telefonica research for the Spoken Web Search (SWS) task [3] within the Mediaeval 2013 evaluation. This is the third year we participate in the evaluation and this time we have submitted a system based on the recently proposed Information Retrieval-based Dynamic Time Warping (IR-DTW) Algorithm. This algorithm performs a pattern matching search at frame level similar to the DTW algorithm, but with advantages in memory usage and the possibility to with preindex the search corpora and use fast retrieval techniques. Results obtained this year have been poorer than expected, most probably due to the use of a global voice activity detector that was not adequate to the varying nature of the different acoustic conditions in this year’s search corpora.