AVIR: A spoken document retrieval system in e-learning environment

In this paper we present AVIR (Audio & Video Information Retrieval), a project of CNR (Italian National Research Council) - ITC to develop a tools to support an information system for distance e-learning. AVIR has been designed to store, index, and classify audio and video lessons to make them available to students and other interested users. The core of AVTR is a SDR (Spoken Document Retrieval) system which automatically transcribes the spoken documents into texts and indexes them through dictionaries appropriately created. During the fruition on-line, the user can formulate his queries searching documents by date, professor, title of the lesson or selecting one or more specific words. The results are presented to the users: in case of video lessons the preview of the first frames is shown. Moreover, slides of the lessons and associate papers can be retrieved.