Supreme Court audio file search engine

Abstract

Search engines have evolved from simple text indexing to indexing other forms of media, such as audio and video. I have designed and implemented a web-based system that permits people to search the transcripts of selected Supreme Court cases, and retrieve audio file clips relevant to the search terms. The system development compared two implementation approaches, one based on transcript aligning technologies developed by Hewlett-Packard, the other is a servlet-based search system designed to return pre-parsed audio file clips. While the first approach has the potential to revolutionize audio content search, it could not consistently deliver successively parsed audio file clips with the same user friendly content and speed as the simpler second approach. This web service, implemented with the second approach, is currently deployed and publicly available at www.supremecourtaudio.net .