Pic-a-topic: Gathering information efficiently from recorded TV shows on travel

Abstract

We introduce a system called Pic-A-Topic, which analyses closed captions of Japanese TV shows on travel to perform topic segmentation and topic sentence selection. Our objective is to provide a table-of-contents interface that enables efficient viewing of desired topical segments within recorded TV shows to users of appliances such as hard disk recorders and digital TVs. According to our experiments using 14.5 hours of recorded travel TV shows, Pic-A-Topic's F1-measure for the topic segmentation task is 82% of manual performance on average. Moreover, a preliminary user evaluation experiment suggests that this level of performance may be indistinguishable from manual performance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.