In this fast-growing information age, information is dynamic, and comes in multi-medial forms. Aside from information is not being limited to text-based only, information can also be in formats like graphics, audio, video or even combination of them all. Living in such technological explosive era, we definitely needed to have some means to manage and retrieve the personally- relevant information for ourselves. Obviously, the presence of search engines does help us achieve this goal. However, while text-based search engines are popular for text-based retrieval, search engines need to be developed for multi-medial content. There is cast amount of information in audio or video format that text-based search engines are incapable to handle. So, we need search engine with the capability of browsing through audio archives and video archives is much desired.

     In this project, we are going to focus on developing an audio search engine. It is also capable of browsing the audio tracks of video archives. Our domain is defined to be the multilingual news from two local television channels -- Jade and Pearl. We chose to build a search engine that supports Cantonese, English and Putonghua, to suit the language environment of Hong Kong.