Weighted matrix factorization for spoken document retrieval

Since more and more multimedia data associated with spoken documents have been made available to the public, spoken document retrieval (SDR) has become an important research subject in the past two decades. Recently, topic models have been successfully used in SDR as well as general information retrieval (IR). These models fall into two categories: probabilistic topic models (PTM) and non-probabilistic topic models (NPTM). One major difference between PTM and NPTM is that the former only takes the words occurring in a document into account, whereas the latter, such as latent semantic analysis (LSA), explicitly models all the words in the vocabulary (including both occurring and non-occurring words). We believe that the non-occurring words can provide additional information that is also useful for SDR. However, to our best knowledge, there is a dearth of work investigating the effectiveness of the non-occurring words for SDR and IR. In order to make effective use of those non-occurring words of documents for semantic analysis, we propose a weighted matrix factorization (WMF) framework, in which the impact of the non-occurring words on the semantic analysis can be modulated properly. The results of SDR experiments conducted on the TDT-2 (Topic Detection and Tracking) collection highlight the performance merits of our proposed framework when compared to several existing topic models.