Topic models over spoken language

Virtually all work on topic modeling has assumed that the topics are to be learned over a text-based document corpus. However, there exist important applications where topic models must be learned over an audio corpus of spoken language. Unfortunately, speech-to-text programs can have very low accuracy. We therefore propose a novel topic model for spoken language that incorporates a statistical model of speech-to-text software behavior. Crucially, our model exploits the uncertainty numbers returned by the software. Our ideas apply to any domain in which it would be useful to build a topic model over data in which uncertainties are explicitly represented. © 2012 IEEE.