Podcast Metadata and Content: Episode Relevance andAttractiveness in Ad Hoc Search
This work addresses the challenge of podcast search for users and professionals, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods for information retrieval.
The study tackled the problem of efficiently locating relevant podcast content by evaluating the utility of metadata and transcripts for ad hoc search, recommending specific indexing and retrieval approaches based on their analysis.
Rapidly growing online podcast archives contain diverse content on a wide range of topics. These archives form an important resource for entertainment and professional use, but their value can only be realized if users can rapidly and reliably locate content of interest. Search for relevant content can be based on metadata provided by content creators, but also on transcripts of the spoken content itself. Excavating relevant content from deep within these audio streams for diverse types of information needs requires varying the approach to systems prototyping. We describe a set of diverse podcast information needs and different approaches to assessing retrieved content for relevance. We use these information needs in an investigation of the utility and effectiveness of these information sources. Based on our analysis, we recommend approaches for indexing and retrieving podcast content for ad hoc search.