A statistical approach to automatic speech summarization

Abstract

This paper proposes a statistical approach to automatic speech summarization. In our method, a set of words maximizing a summarization score indicating the appropriateness of summarization is extracted from automatically transcribed speech and then concatenated to create a summary. The extraction process is performed using a dynamic programming (DP) technique based on a target compression ratio. In this paper, we demonstrate how an English news broadcast transcribed by a speech recognizer is automatically summarized. We adapted our method, which was originally proposed for Japanese, to English by modifying the model for estimating word concatenation probabilities based on a dependency structure in the original speech given by a stochastic dependency context free grammar (SDCFG). We also propose a method of summarizing multiple utterances using a two-level DP technique. The automatically summarized sentences are evaluated by summarization accuracy based on a comparison with a manual summary of speech that has been correctly transcribed by human subjects. Our experimental results indicate that the method we propose can effectively extract relatively important information and remove redundant and irrelevant information from English news broadcasts.