Introduction to the MDR demo system
The Multimedia Document Retrieval (MDR) Demo System allows a user to query a data base of radio broadcasts from the Internet. For this purpose radio broadcasts are downloaded from different stations (NPR, PBS, BBC, ...) and transcribed automatically. This gives a collection of text and audio documents that can be searched by a user with our text based state of the art information retrieval system.There are two different ways in which the user can interact with the demo. Firstly, the user can set up a list of standing interests. For queries in this list the user will be notified after logging into the demo system whenever a new broadcast was found to match the query. Such queries typically refer to recurring topics in the news such as sport events or long term political or economic processes. This feature, effectively, allows the user to filter the incoming news broadcasts. For further details about this feature please refer to the section Login and Search Page.
The second way to interact with the demo is by typing queries into the search field and submitting them directly to the search engine. This will start a search on the complete collection of news broadcasts in the MDR demo database. The results will be shown on one or several pages which allow the user to browse the automatic transcriptions as well as the original broadcasts. For further details on how search results are presented please refer to section Presentation of Search Results.
Furthermore the MDR demo system implements two ways to do query expansion which allows the user to improve the information content of the original query by adding new words to it. This feature is described in section Query Expansion.
If you would like to know more about the different features of the MDR demo system please click on the first link below. The second link leads to an example of a set of pages that were produced by the MDR demo during a user session. The functionality of this "demo snapshot" is restricted as compared to the full version of the MDR demo. By clicking on them some of the disabled features will tell you what they do in the full MDR demo version. For more detailed information about the MDR project at Cambridge University please refer to the MDR project homepage.
