Abstract: Audio hot spotting is accomplished by specifying query criterion to include a non-lexical audio cue. The non-lexical audio cue can be, e.g., speech rate, laughter, applause, vocal effort, speaker change or any combination thereof. The query criterion is retrieved from an audio portion of a file. A segment of the file containing the query criterion can be provided to a user. The duration of the provided segment can be specified by the user along with the files to be searched. A list of detections of the query criterion within the file can also be provided to the user. Searches can be refined by the query criterion additionally including a lexical audio-cue. A keyword index of topic terms contained in the file can also be provided to the user.

Abstract: A system and method are provided that use explicitly and implicitly derived models of user information needs and content and presentation preferences together with relevancy feedback to expand a user's original query to the most related terms in a corpus and/or to allow the user to provide interactive feedback to enhance the relevance of selected news stories and display profile of the selected news stories. By personalizing both the selection of stories and the form in which they are delivered, users are provided with tailored broadcast news.