2005 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Comparing Lexical, Acoustic/Prosodic, Structural and Discourse Features for Speech Summarization

Hirschberg, Julia Bell; Maskey, Sameer R.

We present results of an empirical study of the usefulness of different types of features in selecting extractive summaries of news broadcasts for our Broadcast News Summarization System. We evaluate lexical, prosodic, structural and discourse features as predictors of those news segments which should be included in a summary. We show that a summarization system that uses a combination of these feature sets produces the most accurate summaries, and that a combination of acoustic /prosodic and structural features are enough to build a `good' summarizer when speech transcription is not available.