Summarization of Spanish talk shows with Siamese hierarchical attention networks

Abstract

In this paper, we present an approach to Spanish talk shows summarization. Our approach is based on the use of Siamese Neural Networks on the transcription of the show audios. Specifically, we propose to use Hierarchical Attention Networks to select the most relevant sentences for each speaker about a given topic in the show, in order to summarize his opinion about the topic. We train these networks in a siamese way to determine whether a summary is appropriate or not. Previous evaluation of this approach on summarization task of English newspapers achieved performances similar to other state-of-the-art systems. In the absence of enough transcribed or recognized speech data to train our system for talk show summarization in Spanish, we acquire a large corpus of document-summary pairs from Spanish newspapers and we use it to train our system. We choose this newspapers domain due to its high similarity with the topics addressed in talk shows. A preliminary evaluation of our summarization system on Spanish TV programs shows the adequacy of the proposal.