Speech recognition training method for audio and video file indexing on a search engine

1. A method for indexing audio/video documents through the use of a search engine, the method comprising:

providing, to the search engine, a source of training documents comprising textual content;

the search engine retrieving at least some of the training documents from the source of training documents;

the search engine extracting the textual content from the retrieved training documents;

the search engine indexing the textual content;

training a speech recognition profile using the indexed textual content;

providing, to the search engine, a source for the audio/video documents each of which comprise an associated audio content;

the search engine retrieving at least some of the audio/video documents from the source of documents;

the search engine extracting the associated content from the audio/video documents;

converting the associated audio content into transcriptions using the trained speech recognition profile;

the search engine indexing the transcriptions thereby resulting in an indexing of the audio/video documents; and

saving the indexed transcriptions;

wherein the training of the speech recognition profile comprises using summary sentences and comparing the number of sentences to a threshold to determine if all sentences will be kept for the training.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the providing a source of training documents comprises crawling and retrieving Web documents on a Web site.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the providing a source of training documents comprises crawling and retrieving files on at least one of a local computer network, Intranet, Extranet, file repository or email messaging system.

4. The method of claim 1 , wherein the providing a source of training documents comprises crawling and retrieving data from a database.

5. The method of claim 1 , wherein the retrieving of the audio content comprises retrieving the audio content from the source of training documents.

6. The method of claim 1 , wherein the retrieving of the audio content comprises retrieving the audio content from a source other than the source of training documents.

7. The method of claim 1 , further comprising;

obtaining user input queries;

using the queries, finding sentences from the indexed textual content; and

using the found sentences as input to perform the speech recognition profile training.

8. The method of claim 1 , wherein the speech recognition profile comprises at least one of a dictionary and a language model.

9. The method of claim 1 , further comprising a sentence selection process which comprises calculating a score for each sentence and keeping only those sentences which achieve a given score.

10. The method of claim 9 , wherein the score is calculated using at least one of the number of words and the number of non-alphabetic characters in each of the sentences.

11. The method of claim 9 , wherein the score is calculated by using the number of proper nouns in each of the sentences.

12. The method of claim 11 , wherein the score is calculated by using the frequency of the proper nouns contained in each sentence in a pool of previously selected sentences.

13. The method of claim 11 , wherein the score calculation results in a higher score when the sentence contains proper nouns that are infrequent in the pool of already selected sentences.

14. A method of searching for audio/video documents comprising:

querying an index with a given search criterion, the database comprising transcriptions indexed according to the method of claim 1 ; and

displaying the search results to a user.

15. A search engine system for indexing audio/video documents comprising:

a search engine for:

receiving a source of training documents comprising textual content;

retrieving at least some of the training documents from the source of training documents;

extracting the textual content from the retrieved training documents;

indexing the textual content;

receiving a source for the audio/video documents each of which comprise an associated audio content;

retrieving at least some of the audio/video documents from the source of documents; and

extracting the associated audio content from the audio/video documents;

a training engine for training a speech recognition profile using the indexed textual content;

a speech recognition engine converting the associated audio content into transcriptions using the trained speech recognition profile;

the search engine further for indexing the transcriptions thereby resulting in an indexing of the audio/video documents; and

an index for saving the indexed transcriptions;

wherein the training of the speech recognition profile comprises using summary sentences and comparing the number of sentences to a threshold to determine if all sentences will be kept for the training.

16. The search engine system of claim 15 further comprising a user interface for receiving a query from a user, the query comprising a given search criterion and being used by the search engine for querying the index with the given search criterion, the search engine returning a search result for display by the user interface.