29,939 research outputs found
Generating Abstractive Summaries from Meeting Transcripts
Summaries of meetings are very important as they convey the essential content
of discussions in a concise form. Generally, it is time consuming to read and
understand the whole documents. Therefore, summaries play an important role as
the readers are interested in only the important context of discussions. In
this work, we address the task of meeting document summarization. Automatic
summarization systems on meeting conversations developed so far have been
primarily extractive, resulting in unacceptable summaries that are hard to
read. The extracted utterances contain disfluencies that affect the quality of
the extractive summaries. To make summaries much more readable, we propose an
approach to generating abstractive summaries by fusing important content from
several utterances. We first separate meeting transcripts into various topic
segments, and then identify the important utterances in each segment using a
supervised learning approach. The important utterances are then combined
together to generate a one-sentence summary. In the text generation step, the
dependency parses of the utterances in each segment are combined together to
create a directed graph. The most informative and well-formed sub-graph
obtained by integer linear programming (ILP) is selected to generate a
one-sentence summary for each topic segment. The ILP formulation reduces
disfluencies by leveraging grammatical relations that are more prominent in
non-conversational style of text, and therefore generates summaries that is
comparable to human-written abstractive summaries. Experimental results show
that our method can generate more informative summaries than the baselines. In
addition, readability assessments by human judges as well as log-likelihood
estimates obtained from the dependency parser show that our generated summaries
are significantly readable and well-formed.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Symposium on Document
Engineering, DocEng' 201
Prosody-Based Automatic Segmentation of Speech into Sentences and Topics
A crucial step in processing speech audio data for information extraction,
topic detection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and
topic units. Speech segmentation is challenging, since the cues typically
present for segmenting text (headers, paragraphs, punctuation) are absent in
spoken language. We investigate the use of prosody (information gleaned from
the timing and melody of speech) for these tasks. Using decision tree and
hidden Markov modeling techniques, we combine prosodic cues with word-based
approaches, and evaluate performance on two speech corpora, Broadcast News and
Switchboard. Results show that the prosodic model alone performs on par with,
or better than, word-based statistical language models -- for both true and
automatically recognized words in news speech. The prosodic model achieves
comparable performance with significantly less training data, and requires no
hand-labeling of prosodic events. Across tasks and corpora, we obtain a
significant improvement over word-only models using a probabilistic combination
of prosodic and lexical information. Inspection reveals that the prosodic
models capture language-independent boundary indicators described in the
literature. Finally, cue usage is task and corpus dependent. For example, pause
and pitch features are highly informative for segmenting news speech, whereas
pause, duration and word-based cues dominate for natural conversation.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures. To appear in Speech Communication 32(1-2),
Special Issue on Accessing Information in Spoken Audio, September 200
A Cross-media Retrieval System for Lecture Videos
We propose a cross-media lecture-on-demand system, in which users can
selectively view specific segments of lecture videos by submitting text
queries. Users can easily formulate queries by using the textbook associated
with a target lecture, even if they cannot come up with effective keywords. Our
system extracts the audio track from a target lecture video, generates a
transcription by large vocabulary continuous speech recognition, and produces a
text index. Experimental results showed that by adapting speech recognition to
the topic of the lecture, the recognition accuracy increased and the retrieval
accuracy was comparable with that obtained by human transcription
InfoLink: analysis of Dutch broadcast news and cross-media browsing
In this paper, a cross-media browsing demonstrator named InfoLink is described. InfoLink automatically links the content of Dutch broadcast news videos to related information sources in parallel collections containing text and/or video. Automatic segmentation, speech recognition and available meta-data are used to index and link items. The concept is visualised using SMIL-scripts for presenting the streaming broadcast news video and the information links
Using term clouds to represent segment-level semantic content of podcasts
Spoken audio, like any time-continuous medium, is notoriously difficult to browse or skim without support of an interface providing semantically annotated jump points to signal the user where to listen in. Creation of time-aligned metadata by human annotators is prohibitively expensive, motivating the investigation of representations of segment-level semantic content based on transcripts
generated by automatic speech recognition (ASR). This paper
examines the feasibility of using term clouds to provide users with a structured representation of the semantic content of podcast episodes. Podcast episodes are visualized as a series of sub-episode segments, each represented by a term cloud derived from a transcript
generated by automatic speech recognition (ASR). Quality of
segment-level term clouds is measured quantitatively and their utility is investigated using a small-scale user study based on human labeled segment boundaries. Since the segment-level clouds generated from ASR-transcripts prove useful, we examine an adaptation of text tiling techniques to speech in order to be able to generate segments as part of a completely automated indexing and structuring system for browsing of spoken audio. Results demonstrate that the segments generated are comparable with human selected segment boundaries
Thematic Annotation: extracting concepts out of documents
Contrarily to standard approaches to topic annotation, the technique used in
this work does not centrally rely on some sort of -- possibly statistical --
keyword extraction. In fact, the proposed annotation algorithm uses a large
scale semantic database -- the EDR Electronic Dictionary -- that provides a
concept hierarchy based on hyponym and hypernym relations. This concept
hierarchy is used to generate a synthetic representation of the document by
aggregating the words present in topically homogeneous document segments into a
set of concepts best preserving the document's content.
This new extraction technique uses an unexplored approach to topic selection.
Instead of using semantic similarity measures based on a semantic resource, the
later is processed to extract the part of the conceptual hierarchy relevant to
the document content. Then this conceptual hierarchy is searched to extract the
most relevant set of concepts to represent the topics discussed in the
document. Notice that this algorithm is able to extract generic concepts that
are not directly present in the document.Comment: Technical report EPFL/LIA. 81 pages, 16 figure
TREC video retrieval evaluation: a case study and status report
The TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation is a multiyear, international effort, funded by the US Advanced Research and Development Agency (ARDA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to promote progress in content-based retrieval from digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. Now beginning its fourth year, it aims over time to develop both a better understanding of
how systems can effectively accomplish such retrieval
and how one can reliably benchmark their performance. This paper can be seen as a case study in the development of video retrieval systems and their evaluation as well as a report on their status to-date. After an introduction to the evolution of the evaluation over the past three years, the paper reports on the most recent evaluation TRECVID 2003: the evaluation framework â the 4 tasks (shot boundary determination, high-level feature extraction, story segmentation and typing, search), 133 hours of US television
news data, and measures â, the results, and the approaches taken by the 24 participating groups
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