The paper presents the Position Specific Posterior Lattice, a novel representation of automatic speech recognition lattices that naturally lends itself to efficient indexing of position information and subsequent relevance ranking of spoken documents using proximity. In experiments performed on a collection of lecture recordings — MIT iCampus data — the spoken document ranking accuracy was improved by 20% relative over the commonly used baseline of indexing the 1-best output from an automatic speech recognizer. The Mean Average Precision (MAP) increased from when using 1-best output to when using the new lattice representation. .
