  We introduce QuerYD, a new large-scale dataset for retrieval and event
localisation in video. A unique feature of our dataset is the availability of
two audio tracks for each video: the original audio, and a high-quality spoken
description of the visual content. The dataset is based on YouDescribe, a
volunteer project that assists visually-impaired people by attaching voiced
narrations to existing YouTube videos. This ever-growing collection of videos
contains highly detailed, temporally aligned audio and text annotations. The
content descriptions are more relevant than dialogue, and more detailed than
previous description attempts, which can be observed to contain many
superficial or uninformative descriptions. To demonstrate the utility of the
QuerYD dataset, we show that it can be used to train and benchmark strong
models for retrieval and event localisation. Data, code and models are made
publicly available, and we hope that QuerYD inspires further research on video
understanding with written and spoken natural language.
