# Vocal Access to a Newspaper Archive: Design Issues and Preliminary Investigation

## 1 Introduction

For the last 50 years Information Retrieval has been concerned with enabling users to retrieve textual documents (most often only references) in response to textual queries. With the availability of faster computers and cheaper electronic storage it is now possible to store and search the full text of millions of large textual documents online. It has been observed that the widespread access to Internet and the high bandwidth often available to users makes them think that there is nothing easier than connect and search a large information repository. Nevertheless, there are cases in which users may need to search an information repository without having access to a computer or to an Internet connection. There are cases in which the only thing available is a low bandwidth telephone line. We can make a number of examples of such situations: an automatic booking service for an airline company that give direct access to recognised customers, a press archive for journalists on mission abroad (in particular in developing countries), an automatic telephone based customer support system, and so on. In all these cases it is necessary to have access and interact with a system capable not only of understanding the user spoken query, finding documents and presenting them as speech, but also capable of interacting with the user in order to better clarify and specify his information need whenever this is not clear enough to proceed effectively with the searching. This paper is concerned with the design issues and the architecture of a prototype of one of such systems.

The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 introduces the difficult marriage between IR and speech. Section 3 gives the background of this work and explains its final objective: the Interactive Vocal Information Retrieval System. Section 4 reports on the current state of the implementation of the prototype system, while section 5 briefly describes some interesting findings of the feasibility study.

## 2 Information Retrieval and Speech

Information Retrieval (IR) is the branch of computing science that aims at storing and allowing fast access to a large amount of multimedia information, like for example text, images, speech, and so on . An Information Retrieval System is a computing tool that enables a user to access information by its semantic content using advanced statistical, probabilistic, and/or linguistic techniques.

Most current IR systems enable fast and effective retrieval of textual information or documents, in collections of very large size, sometimes containing millions of documents. The retrieval of multimedia information, on the other hand, is still an open problem. Very few IR systems capable of retrieving multimedia information by its semantic content have been developed. Often multimedia information is retrieved by means of an attached textual description.

The marriage between IR and speech is a very recent event. IR has been concerned for the last 50 years with textual documents and queries. It is only recently that talking about multimedia IR has become possible. Progress in speech recognition and synthesis  and the availability of cheap storage and processing power have made possible what only a few years ago was unthinkable.

The association between IR and speech has different possibilities:

* textual queries and spoken documents;
* spoken queries and textual documents;
* spoken queries and spoken documents.

In the large majority of current IR systems capable of dealing with speech, the spoken documents or queries are first transformed into their textual transcripts and then dealt by the IR system with techniques that are derived from those used in normal textual IR.

The retrieval of spoken documents using a textual query is a fast emerging area of research (see for example ). It involves an efficient, more than effective, combination of the most advanced techniques used in speech recognition and IR. The increasing interest in this area of research is confirmed by the inclusion, for the first time, of a retrieval of spoken documents retrieval track in the TREC-6 conference . The problem here is to devise IR models that can cope with the large number of errors inevitably found in the transcripts of the spoken documents. Models designed for retrieval of OCRed documents have proved useful in this context . Another problem is related to the fact that, although IR models can easily cope with the fast searching of large document collections, fast speech recognition of a large number of long spoken documents is a much more difficult task. Because of this, spoken documents are converted into textual transcripts off-line, and only the transcripts are dealt by the IR system.

The problem of retrieving textual documents using a spoken query may seem easier than the previous one, because of the smaller size of the speech recognition task involved. However, it is not so. While the incorrect or uncertain recognition of an instance of a word in a long spoken document can be compensated by its correct recognition in some other instances, the incorrect recognition of a word in a spoken query can have disastrous consequences. Queries are generally very short<sup>1</sup><sup>1</sup>1There is an on-going debate about realistic query lengths. While TREC queries are on average about 40 words long, Web queries are only 2 words long on average. This recently motivated the creation in TREC of a “short query” track, to experiment with queries of more realistic length. and the failing of recognising a query word, or worse, the incorrect recognition of a query word will fail to retrieve a large number of relevant documents or wrongly retrieve a large number of non-relevant documents.

The retrieval of spoken queries in response to spoken documents is a very complex task and is more in the realm of speech processing than IR, although IR techniques could be useful. Speech recognition and processing techniques can be used to compare spoken words and sentences in their raw form, without the need of generating textual transcripts. We will not address this issue here.

## 3 The Interactive Vocal Information Retrieval System

In the second half of 1997, at Glasgow University, we started a project on the sonification of an IR environment. The project is funded by the European Union under the Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR) scheme of the Fourth Framework. The main objective of the project is to enable a user to interact (e.g. submit queries, commands, relevance assessments, and receive summaries of retrieved documents) with a probabilistic IR system over a low bandwidth communication system, like for example a telephone line. An outline of the system specification is reported in the figure 1.

The interactive vocal information retrieval system (IVIRS), resulting from the “sonification” of a probabilistic IR system, has the following components:

* a vocal dialog manager (VDM) that provides an “intelligent” speech interface between user and IR system;
* a probabilistic IR system (PIRS) that deals with the probabilistic ranking and retrieval of documents in a large textual information repository;
* a document summarisation system (DSS) that produces a summary of the content of retrieved documents in such a way that the user will be able to assess their relevance to his information need;
* a document delivery system (DDS) that delivers documents on request by the user via electronic mail, ftp, fax, or postal service.

It is important to emphasise that such a system cannot be developed simply with off the shelf components. In fact, although some components (DSS, DDS, and the Text-to-Speech module of the VDM) have already been developed in other application contexts, it is necessary to modify and integrate them for the IR task.

The IVIRS prototype works in the following way. A user connects to the system using a telephone. After the system has recognised the user by means of a username and a password (to avoid problems in this phase we devised a login procedure based on keying in an identification number using a touch tone), the user submit a spoken query to the system. The VDM interact with the user to identify the exact part of spoken dialogue that constitutes the query. The query is then translated into text and fed to the PIRS. Additional information regarding the confidence of the speech recognisers is also fed to the PIRS. This information is necessary in order to limit the effects of wrongly recognised words in the query, Additionally, an effective interaction between the system and the user can also help to solve this problem. The system could ask the user for confirmation in case of a uncertain recognition of a word, asking to re-utter the word or to select one of the possible recognised alternatives. The PIRS searches the textual archive and produces a ranked list of documents, and a threshold is used to find the a set of document regarded as surely relevant (this feature can be set in the most appropriate way by the user). The user is informed on the number of documents found to be relevant and can submit a new query or ask to inspect the documents found. Documents in the ranked list are passed to the DSS that produces a short representation of each document that is read to the user over the telephone by the Text-to-Speech module the VDM. The user can wait until a new document is read, ask to skip the document, mark it as relevant or stop the process all together. Marked documents are stored in retrieved set and the use can proceed with a new query if he wishes so. A document marked as relevant can also be used to refine the initial query and find additional relevant documents by feeding it back to the PIRS. This relevance feedback process is also useful in case of wrongly recognised query words, since the confidence values of query words increase if they are found in relevant documents. This interactive process can go on until the user is satisfied with the retrieved set of documents. Finally, the user can ask the documents in the retrieved set to be read in their entirety or sent to a known addressed by the DDS. 

### 3.1 The Vocal Dialog Manager

The human-computer interaction performed by the VDM is not a simple process that can be done by off the shelf devices. The VDM needs to interact in an “intelligent” way with the user and with the PIRS in order to understand completely and execute correctly the commands given by the user. In fact, while the technology available to develop the speech synthesis (Text-to-Speech) module is sufficient for this project (but see section 5.1), the technology available for the speech recognition (Speech-to-Text) module is definitely not. On one hand, the translation of speech into text is a much harder task than the translation of text to speech, in particular in the case of continuous speech, speaker independent, large vocabulary, noisy channel speech recognition. On the other hand, it is necessary to take into consideration the three possible forms of uncertainty that will be present in the IR environment by adding a vocal/speech component:

1. the uncertainty related to the speech recognition process;
2. the uncertainty given by the word sense ambiguity present in the natural language;
3. the uncertainty related to the use of the spoken query in the retrieval process.

In order to deal with these different forms of uncertainty we need not only to developed a advanced retrieval model for the PIRS, but also develop a model of the user-VMD-PIRS interaction that encompasses a language model, an interaction model and a translation model. This later part of the project is still at the early stages of development and will not be presented here. In this context we also make use of the results of previous work in this area, although in rather different applications (see for example .

Currently we are building a model of the telephone interactions between users and PIRS analysing the results of a study carried out using the “Wizard of Oz” technique. The Wizard of Oz technique is a way of simulating human-computer interfaces. Unknown to the user, a human “wizard” performs some of the functions of the computer such as responding to the user’s spoken input. The technique is commonly used where the technology for running the interface does not yet exist or is not yet sophisticated enough to be used in real time. Examples include experiments where the recognition vocabulary is within current capabilities (e.g. sequences of digits) but the recognition performance required is beyond current capabilities.

The particular Wizard of Oz simulation we are currently using for the design of the VDM incorporates a statistical model of word recognition errors, whereby a realistic distribution of speech recogniser errors can be generated at any desired overall accuracy level.

A limitation to the realism of this form of simulation is that recognition performance depends only on the content of the user’s input, and not on its quality (clarity of speaking, background noise etc) as it would with a real recogniser. This is particularly relevant in the case of word-spotting, where the recogniser is designed to pick out instances of keywords embedded in arbitrary speech. Typically the accuracy of a real word-spotter is better for isolated keyword utterances than for embedded ones. To address this, a second-generation simulation method is currently being developed, in which the wizard’s input (giving the keyword content of the utterance) is combined with acoustic information extracted automatically from the speech signal. This will enable us to design appropriate error recovery strategies whenever one or more words in the spoken query are below a certain threshold of recognition.

The VMD has two sub-components: a Speech-to-Text module and a Text-to-Speech module.

The Speech-to-Text module is arguably the most important and the most problematic module of the VMD. Speech recognition has been progressing very rapidly in the last few years  and results are improving day by day, in particular for speaker dependent systems. There is already a number of system commercially available that guarantee quite impressive performance once they have been properly trained by the user (e.g. Dragon Naturally Speaking, IBM Viva Voce, etc.). The user also needs to teach how to recognise words that are not part of the recogniser’s vocabulary. The situation is not so good with speaker independent continuous speech recognition systems over the telephone, although a number of studies have achieved some acceptable results . In this context we do not intend to develop any new speech recognition system. This is a difficult area of research for which we do not have necessary know-how. Instead, we make use of available state-of-the-art technology and try to integrate it in our system. The aim is to enable the PIRS to deal with the uncertainty related to the spoken query recognition process, integrating this uncertainty with the classical uncertainty of intrinsic in the IR process. Two strategies are currently being experimented with:

* use the speech recogniser’s “confidence” in recognising a word;
* merging the output of a number of speech recognisers to compensate for errors of single speech recognisers and create an “combined confidence” in recognising a word.

In section 5.2 we report some initial results on the use of these techniques.

The Text-to-Speech module uses the state-of-the-art technology in speech synthesis . We carried out a survey and an initial testing of available speech synthesis systems. In section 5.1 we report some initial results of an experimentation into the user’s perception of relevance of spoken documents. In the experiments carried out we used to different commercial speech synthesis systems.

### 3.2 The Probabilistic Information Retrieval System

The PIRS performs a ranking of the document in the collection in decreasing order of their estimated probability of relevance to the user’s query. Past and present research has made use of formal probability theory and statistics in order to solve the problems of estimation . An schematic example of how a probabilistic IR system works is depicted in figure 2.

Currently there is no PIRS with speech input/output capabilities. The adding of these capabilities to a PIRS is not simply a matter of fitting together a few components, since there needs to be some form of feedback between PIRS and VMD so that the speech input received from the user and translated into text can be effectively recognised by the PIRS and used. If, for example, a word in a spoken query is not recognised by the PIRS, but is very close (phonetically) to some other word the PIRS knows about and that is used in a similar context (information that the PIRS can get from statistical analysis of the word occurrence), then the PIRS could suggest to the user to use this new word in the query instead on the unknown one.

Additionally, it is generally recognised in IR that improvement in effectiveness can be achieved by enhancing the interaction between system and user. One of the most advanced techniques used for this purpose is relevance feedback (RF). RF is a technique that allows a user to interactively express his information requirement by adapting his original query formulation with further information . This additional information is often provided by indicating some relevant documents among the documents retrieved by the system. When a document is marked as relevant the RF process analyses the text of the document, picking out words that are statistically significant, and modifies the original query accordingly. RF is a good technique for specifying an information need, because it releases the user from the burden of having to think up of words for the query and because it limits the effects of errors in the recognition of query words. Instead the user deals with the ideas and concepts contained in the documents. It also fits in well with the known human trait of “I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it”. RF can also be used to detect words that were wrongly recognised by the VMD. In fact if, for example, a query word uttered by the user never appears in documents that the user points out to be relevant, while another word similarly spelled (or pronounced) often occurs, then it is quite likely (and we can evaluate this probability) that the VMD was wrong in recognising that word and that the word really uttered by the user is the other word. The overall performance of the interactive system can be enhanced also using other similar forms of interactions between PIRS and VMD that are current object of study.

### 3.3 The Document Summarisation System

The DSS performs a query oriented document summarisation aimed at stressing the relation between the document content and the query. This enables the user to assess in a better and faster way the relevance of the document to his information need and provide correct feedback to the PIRS on the relevance of the document. Query oriented document summarisation attempts to concentrate users’ attention on the parts of the text that possess a high density of relevant information. This emerging area of research has its origins in methods known as passage retrieval (see for example ). These methods identify and present to the user individual text passages that are more focussed towards particular information needs than the full document texts. The main advantage of these approaches is that they provide an intuitive overview of the distribution of the relevant pieces of information within the documents. As a result, it may be easier for users to decide on the relevance of the retrieved documents to their queries.

The summarisation system employed in IVIRS is the one developed by Tombros and Sanderson at Glasgow University . The system is based on a number of sentence extraction methods that utilise information both from the documents of the collection and from the queries used. A thorough description of the system can be found in  and will not be reported here. In summary, a document passes through a parsing system, and as a result a score for each sentence of the document is computed. This score represents the sentence’s importance for inclusion in the document’s summary. Scores are assigned to sentences by examining the structural organisation of each document (to distinguish word in the title or in other important parts of the document, for example), and by utilising within-document word frequency information. The document summary is then generated by selecting the top-scoring sentences, and outputting them in the order in which they appear in the full document. The summary length is a fraction of the full document’s length. For the documents used in our experimentation the summary length was set at 15% of the document’s length, up to a maximum of five sentences.

### 3.4 The Document Delivery System

The DDS performs the delivery of all or parts of the document(s) requested by the user. The user can decide the way and format of the document delivery; this information is usually stored in a user profile, so that the user does not need to give this information every time he uses the system. Documents can be delivered by voice (read in their entirety to the user through the telephone), electronic mail, postal service, or fax; if delivered by electronic mail a number of different document formats are available, like for example, PDF, postscript, RDF, or ASCII.

## 4 Prototype Implementation

The implementation of the prototype system outlined in the previous sections requires, as a first step, a careful choice of some already existing software components: a speech recognition system, a speech synthesis system, a probabilistic IR system, and a document summarisation system. This calls for a survey of the state-of-the-art of several different areas of research some of which are familiar to us, while others are new to us. A second step involves the development of a model for the VDM and of its interaction with the other components. The prototype implementation of the overall system requires a careful tuning and testing with different users and in several different conditions (noisy environment, foreign speaker, etc.).

The prototype implementation of IVIRS is still in progress. A “divide et impera” approach is currently being followed, consisting of dividing the implementation and experimentation of IVIRS in the parallel implementation and experimentation of its different components. The integration of the various components will be the last stage. Currently we have implemented and experimented with the DSS, the Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text modules of the VDM, and the DDS. We are currently developing the PIRS, and the VDM.

## 5 Initial Evaluation Results

In this section we report on the initial results found experimenting with the DSS, and the Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text modules of the VDM. This constitutes part of a feasibility study of the system. In the pilot implementation of the IVIRS prototype we use a collection of newspaper articles, in particular the TREC Wall Street Journal collection.

### 5.1 Experimentation of the Document Summarisation System and Text-to-Speech Module

One of the underlying assumptions of the design and development of the IVIRS system is that a user would be able to assess the relevance of a retrieved document by hearing a synthesised voice reading a brief description of its semantic content through a telephone line. This is essential for an effective use of the system. In order to test the validity of this assumption we carried out a series of experiments with the DSS and Text-to-Speech module of the IVIRS. The aim of this experimentation was to investigate the effect that different forms of presentation of document descriptions have on users’ perception of the relevance of a document. In a previous study, Tombros and Sanderson  used document titles, and automatically generated, query biased summaries as document descriptions, and measured user performance in relevance judgements when the descriptions were displayed on a computer screen and read by the users. The results from that study were used in this experiment, and compared to results obtained when users are listening to the document descriptions instead of reading them. Three different ways of auditory transmission are employed in our study: document descriptions are read by a human to the subjects, read by a human to the subjects over the telephone, and finally read by a speech synthesis system over the telephone to the subjects. The objective was that by manipulating the level of the independent variable of the experiment (the form of presentation), we could examine the value of the dependent variable of the experiment (the user performance in relevance judgements). We also tried to prove that any variation in user performance between the experimental conditions was to be attributed only to the change of level of the independent variable. In order to be able to make such a claim, we had to ensure that the so-called “situational variables” (e.g. background noise, equipment used, experimenter’s behaviour) were held constant throughout the experimental procedure. Such variables could introduce bias in the results if they systematically changed from one experimental condition to another .

In order to be able to use the experimental results reported in , the same task was introduced in our design: users were presented with a list documents retrieved in response to a query, and had to identify as many documents relevant to that particular query as possible within 5 minutes. The information that was presented for each document was its title, and its automatically generated, query oriented description. Moreover, we used exactly the same set of queries (50 randomly chosen TREC queries), set of retrieved documents for each query (the 50 top-ranked documents), and document descriptions as in . Queries were randomly allocated to subjects by means of a draw, but since each subject was presented with a total of 15 queries (5 queries for each condition) we ensured that no query was assigned to a specific user more than once. A group consisting of 10 users was employed in the experimental procedure. The population was drawn from postgraduate students in computer science. All users performed the same retrieval task described in the previous paragraph under the three different experimental conditions.

The experiment involved the presentation of document descriptions to subjects in three different forms, all of which were of an auditory nature. In two of the experimental conditions the same human read the document descriptions to each subject, either by being physically in the same room (though not directly facing the subject), or by being located in a different room and reading the descriptions over the telephone. In the last experimental condition a speech synthesiser read the document description to the user over the telephone. User interaction with the system was defined in the following way: the system would start reading the description of the top ranked document. At any point in time the user could stop the system and instruct it to move to the next document, or instruct it to repeat the current document description. If none of the above occurred, the system would go through the current document description, and upon reaching its end it would proceed to the next description.

Table 1 reports the results of the user relevance assessment in terms of precision, recall and average time for all four conditions: on screen description (S), read description (V), description read over the telephone (T), and computer synthesised description read over the telephone (C). These results show how users in condition S performed better in terms of precision and recall and were also faster. Recall and average time slowly decreased from S to C, although some of these differences are not statistically significant (i.e. the average time of V and T). We were surprised to notice that precision was slightly higher for condition T than for conditions V or C. Users tended to be more concentrated when hearing the descriptions read over the telephone than by the same person in the same room, in front of them, but this concentration was not enough when the quality of the voice was getting worse. Nevertheless, the difference in precision between conditions S and C was not so large (only about 5%) to create unsolvable problems for a telephone based IR system.

A difference that was certainly significant was in the average time taken to assess the relevance for one document. The difference between the condition S and C was quite large and enabled a user to assess on average, in the same amount of time (5 minutes), 70% more documents in condition S than in condition C (22 documents instead of 13). A sensible user would have to evaluate if it is more cost effective, in terms of time connected to the service, to access the system using computer and modem and looking at the documents on the screen, than accessing the system using a telephone. Nonetheless, difference in the average time taken to assess the relevance for one document were very subjective, in fact, we could notice that some users were slow whatever the condition, while other were always fast.

These preliminary results enable us to conclude that a IVIRS system is indeed feasible and, provided we solve the issued related to the correct recognition of the user query, we can expect to develop a system that could be useful.

### 5.2 Experimentation of the Speech-to-Text Module

In  we presented the results of the experimentation of a number of techniques for the retrieval of spoken documents. In particular, two techniques were experimented, both attempting to use confidence values generated in the speech recognition process to deal with the uncertainty related to the spoken words in the documents. In one set of experiments we used confidence values generated by the speech recogniser, in another set of experiments we generated this confidence values by merging the transcripts of a number of different recognisers. While the first strategy was not successful due to our ignorance of the way the confidence values are generated by a speech recogniser, using the simple strategy of merging the transcripts of spoken documents of different recognisers showed most promise.

In the context of the SIRE project we attempted to use the same technique of merging different transcripts with spoken queries. The challenge here is due to the fact the queries are usually much shorter than documents and errors in the recognition of words in queries cause more damage to retrieval effectiveness than errors in the recognition of words in documents.

Although this experimentation is still going on, the initial results were not encouraging. We experimented with merging the transcripts of spoken queries originated by two and three different speech recognition systems. The improvement in word recognition and confidence obtained over the use of a single speech recognition system, although considerable, was not enough to increase the level of effectiveness of a PIRS. The major problem was caused by the inclusion in the transcript of queries of words wrongly recognised. Although the event of words being wrongly recognised by more that a recogniser was rare, resulting in wrongly recognised words having usually low confidence levels, the inclusion of any such word in the query transcript had disastrous effects on the effectiveness of the retrieval process. The ranking produced by the IR system was highly influenced by the wrongly recognised words since this were quite often rare words and therefore had high indexing weights. Instead, the effect of missing a word from the query transcript was not detrimental, but this result may not be entirely fair as very few of the queries we used had words outside recognisers’ vocabulary. More “realistic” queries containing many proper nouns might produce different results and require an alternative approach: for example, a recogniser using both word and sub-word unit recognition. An alternative strategy could consist in using a PIRS employing a query expansion technique to expand, from a text corpus, unrecognised query words with those in the recognisers’ vocabulary (using, for example, Local Context Analysis ). We are currently experimenting with the latter technique.

## 6 Conclusions

In this paper we outlined the design of an interactive vocal IR system. We also reported on some initial experimentation which highlights the complexity of the implementation of such a system. The work presented here is still in progress and the full implementation of the system is under way. We expect to be able to have a working prototype system very soon. The evaluation of such system and, in particular, of the user interaction will constitute an exciting area of research.

## Acknowledgements

The author is currently supported by a “Marie Curie” Research Fellowship from the European Union.

The experimentation reported in section 5.1 was carried out with the help of Anastasios Tombros.