Introducing topic segmentation and segmented-based browsing tools into a content based video retrieval system

One important class of online videos are news broadcasts. Most news organisations provide immediate access to topical news broadcasts over the Internet, through RSS streams or podcasts. Until lately, technology has not made it possible for a user to automatically find, within a longer broadcast, the smaller parts that might interest them. Recent advances in both speech recognition systems and natural language processing have led to a number of robust tools that allow us to provide users with quicker and more focussed access to relevant segments of one or more news broadcast videos. Here we present our new interface for browsing or searching news broadcasts (video or audio) that exploits these new tools to provide immediate access to topical passages within news broadcasts; to browse news broadcasts by events as well as by people, places and organisations; to perform cross lingual search of news broadcasts; to search for news through a map interface; to browse news by trending topics; and to have a brief automatically generated textual characterisation of news segments before listening. Our publicly searchable VoxaleadNews demonstrator currently indexes daily broadcast news content from 50 sources in English, French, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, Dutch and Russian.