Speech summarization without lexical features for Mandarin broadcast news

Abstract

We present the first known empirical study on speech summarization without lexical features for Mandarin broadcast news. We evaluate acoustic, lexical and structural features as predictors of summary sentences. We find that the summarizer yields good performance at the average Fmeasure of 0.5646 even by using the combination of acoustic and structural features alone, which are independent of lexical features. In addition, we show that structural features are superior to lexical features and our summarizer performs surprisingly well at the average F-measure of 0.3914 by using only acoustic features. These findings enable us to summarize speech without placing a stringent demand on speech recognition accuracy.