Simulating Zero-Resource Spoken Term Discovery

If search engines are ever to index all of the spoken content in the world, they will need to handle hundreds of languages for which no automatic speech recognition systems exist. Zero-resource spoken term discovery, in which repeated content is detected in some acoustic representation, offers a potentially useful source of indexing features. This paper describes a text-based simulation of a zero-resource spoken term discovery system that allows any information retrieval test collection to be used as a basis for early development of information retrieval techniques. It is proposed that these techniques can be later applied to actual zero-resource spoken term discovery results.