MITH has a double-header of Digital Dialogue offerings next week, at
our regular Tuesday 12:30 slot AND a special session on Wednesday at
3:00.

Tuesday, October 24, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Lessons from the MALACH Project: Applying new technologies to improve
intellectual access to large oral history collections”
by DOUGLAS W. OARD, College of Information Studies and UMIACS,
University of Maryland

In this talk I will describe the goals of the MALACH project
(Multilingual Access to Large Spoken Archives) and some of our
research results. I’ll begin by describing the unique characteristics
of the oral history collection that we are using, in which Holocaust
survivors, witnesses and rescuers were interviewed in several
languages. Each interview has been digitized and extensively
catalogued by subject matter experts, thus producing a remarkably rich
collection for the application of machine learning techniques.
Automatic speech recognition techniques originally developed for the
domain of conversational telephone speech were adapted to process with
word error rates that are adequate to support interactive search and
automated clustering, detection of topic shifts, and topic
classification. In this talk, I will describe the studies that we
conducted to learn about what needs our systems should be designed to
meet and I’ll summarize key results from our system development
activities. I’ll conclude with some remarks about possible future
directions for research applying new technologies to improve
intellectual access to oral history and other spoken word collections.

Douglas Oard is Associate Dean for Research in the College of
Information Studies at the University of Maryland. An Associate
Professor in the College, he holds a joint appointment in the
Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and affiliate
appointments in the Computer Science Department and the Applied
Mathematics and Scientific Computation Program. Dr. Oard earned his
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, and
his research interests center around the use of emerging technologies
to support information seeking by end users. Recent work has focused
on interactive techniques for cross-language information retrieval,
searching conversational media, and leveraging observable behavior to
improve user modeling. Additional information is available at
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~oard.

–

Coming up @MITH, Oct. 31: Jason Nelson’s appearance has been
CANCELLED. Instead, in keeping with some current research projects,
MITH will be hosting an open roundtable on Massively Multiplayer
Online Role Playing Games (MMRPGs). We would especially like to hear
from currently active players of such games (Second Life, World of
Warcraft, etc.) View the complete Fall 2006 schedule for Digital
Dialogues here:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_fall_2006.pdf

Free and open to the public.

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-5896).