Vocapia Research and LIMSI-CNRS have partnered to provide automatic transcriptions of audiovideo data for two MediaEval 2011 tasks: Genre Tagging and Rich Speech Retrieval.

MediaEval 2011 is using the same corpus used in the 2010 MediaEval Wild Wild Web Tagging Task for which Vocapia and LIMSI had previously provided automatic transcripts. Updated speech-to-text transcriptiion systems have been used to process a multilingual collection of Internet video collected from blip.tv and selected by the PetaMedia Network of Excellence. Most of the data is in English with approximately a total of 6 hours of data spread across the French, Spanish and Dutch languages. All videos were shared by their owners under a Creative Commons license.

Vocapia Research, founded in July 2000, is an R&D company and software publisher developing and providing leading edge speech technologies and solutions for many languages, including most major European languages as well as Arabic, Mandarin, and Russian. The Vocapia Research VoxSigma^® software suite uses advanced language technologies such as language identification, speech recognition, and speaker identification to transform raw audio and audiovisual data into structured and searchable XML documents. This technology relies on over 25 years of research at LIMSI-CNRS, with which there is a priviledged partnership. Joint systems developed with LIMSI have achieved top ranks in national and international challenges of speech-to-text transcription. The most common applications of the VoxSigma software suite are audio and audiovisual data mining (broadcast data, podcasts, call center data), media monitoring, and media asset management. Vocapia Research is located in the scientific pole of the Saclay Plateau, France. Readers who wish to get more information about Vocapia Research are invited to check out the Vocapia Research website or use the contact information page http://www.vocapia.com/contact.

The Computer Sciences Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineering Sciences (LIMSI) is a CNRS (French National Agency for Scientific Research) laboratory associated with Paris VI and Paris XI Universities, being located on the Orsay campus of the latter. The laboratory undertakes multidisciplinary research in mechanical and chemical engineering and in sciences and technologies for information and communication. The research fields cover a wide spectrum from thermodynamics to cognition, encompassing fluid mechanics, energetics, acoustics and voice synthesis, spoken and written language processing, vision, human interaction and virtual reality. To know more, please check out the web site: http://www.limsi.fr.