With recent advances in
information technology, digital archiving is emerging as an important and
practical method for capturing the human experience. We propose to generate a
quantum leap in the ability to access the contents of these archives by
advancing the state of the art in automated speech recognition (ASR) and other
component technologies. Before archives can be used efficiently, their contents
must first be described, through some combination of human effort and
automation. The scale of the collections and the difficulty of the task make it
impractical to accomplish this entirely manually, particularly in the
multilingual environment that globally interconnected information systems
produce. Automatic technologies for search and exploration in spoken materials
presently have relatively limited capabilities; capabilities that must be
dramatically enhanced if the full potential of digital archiving is to be
realized. In this project, we seek to make just such a leap, utilizing the
world’s largest digital archive of video oral histories. The multimedia digital archive collected by
the Survivors of the Shoah Visual
History Foundation contains over 116,000 hours of interviews with over
52,000 survivors, liberators, rescuers and witnesses of the Nazi Holocaust,
recorded in 32 languages. Four thousand of the interviews in English have been
manually cataloged at great expense, producing an exceptional source of labeled
training data. In this project, we will use the unique features of this
collection – massive quantities of multilingual audio and an extensive set of
labeled training data – to achieve critical breakthroughs that will
dramatically improve access to the recorded heritage of human civilization in
this collection and others.