Soundbite Detection in Broadcast News Domain

In this paper, we present results of a study designed to identify SOUNDBITES in Broadcast News. We describe a Conditional Random Field-based model for the detection of these included speech segments uttered by individuals who are interviewed or who are the subject of a news story. Our goal is to identify direct quotations in spoken corpora which can be directly attributable to particular individuals, as well as to associate these soundbites with their speakers. We frame soundbite detection as a binary classification problem in which each turn is categorized either as a soundbite or not. We use lexical, acoustic/prosodic and structural features on a turn level to train a CRF. We performed a 10-fold cross validation experiment in which we obtained an accuracy of 67.4 % and an F-measure of 0.566 which is 20.9 % and 38.6 % higher than a chance baseline. Index Terms: soundbite detection, speaker roles, speech summarization, information extraction

Soundbite Detection in Broadcast News Domain

In this paper, we present results of a study designed to identify SOUNDBITES in Broadcast News. We describe a Conditional Random Field-based model for the detection of these included speech segments uttered by individuals who are interviewed or who are the subject of a news story. Our goal is to identify direct quotations in spoken corpora which can be directly attributable to particular individuals, as well as to associate these soundbites with their speakers. We frame soundbite detection as a binary classification problem in which each turn is categorized either as a soundbite or not. We use lexical, acoustic/prosodic and structural features on a turn level to train a CRF. We performed a 10-fold cross validation experiment in which we obtained an accuracy of 67.4 % and an F-measure of 0.566 which is 20.9 % and 38.6 % higher than a chance baseline. Index Terms: soundbite detection, speaker roles, speech summarization, information extraction

Fictive interaction in blended networks in the daily show with Jon Stewart: conceptualizing politican humor discourse not only for entertaining purpouses

[ES] Esta tesis analiza el discurso de Jon Stewart, el anterior presentador del conocidísimo programa satírico de “soft news” estadounidense The Daily Show. Más concretamente, se analiza un fenómeno conceptual que el presentador utilizaba frecuentemente en sus monólogos, basado en el uso de un marco (“frame”) en el que se da la interacción directa cara a cara como patrón organizativo para estructurar la cognición, la interacción ficticia (“fictive interaction”) (Pascual 2002; 2006; 2008a; 2008b; 2014), no solo para informar a su audiencia pero también para criticar y presentar sus propios puntos de vista y opiniones. El objetivo principal fue analizar las redes de interacción ficticia creadas por Stewart, como estrategias retóricas de su discurso, que implicaban mantener conversaciones ficticias con personas “reales”, que no estaban presentes en el estudio y que en realidad no tomaban parte en cualquiera de estas interacciones, diseñadas tan solo para los espectadores. Aunque estos diálogos imaginarios se realicen en una estructura de interacción abierta, es decir, durante los monólogos del presentador, constituyen una comunicación tridireccional, conocida como triálogo ficticio (“fictive trialogue”) (Pascual 2002; 2008b; 2014). Los triálogos ficticios son estructuras conceptuales prototípicas de programas de televisión como The Daily Show, donde el presentador, Jon Stewart, que es el productor ficticio habla con un receptor ficticio para beneficio de los espectadores, los oyentes participativos (“bystanders”) ficticios que están escuchando las conversaciones irreales. Estas interacciones imposibles son producidas no solo para hacer reír el público, sino también con fines retóricos

A Cascaded Broadcast News Highlighter

This paper presents a fully automatic news skimming system which takes a broadcast news audio stream and provides the user with the segmented, structured and highlighted transcript. This constitutes a system with three different, cascading stages: converting the audio stream to text using an automatic speech recogniser, segmenting into utterances and stories and finally determining which utterance should be highlighted using a saliency score. Each stage must operate on the erroneous output from the previous stage in the system; an effect which is naturally amplified as the data progresses through the processing stages. We present a large corpus of transcribed broadcast news data enabling us to investigate to which degree information worth highlighting survives this cascading of processes. Both extrinsic and intrinsic experimental results indicate that mistakes in the story boundary detection has a strong impact on the quality of highlights, whereas erroneous utterance boundaries cause only minor problems. Further, the difference in transcription quality does not affect the overall performance greatly

From Text to Speech Summarization

In this paper, we present approaches used in text summarization, showing how they can be adapted for speech summarization and where they fall short. Informal style and apparent lack of structure in speech mean that the typical approaches used for text summarization must be extended for use with speech. We illustrate how features derived from speech can help determine summary content within two ongoing summarization projects at Columbia University

Automatic role recognition

The computing community is making significant efforts towards the development of automatic approaches for the analysis of social interactions. The way people interact depends on the context, but there is one aspect that all social interactions seem to have in common: humans behave according to roles. Therefore, recognizing the roles of participants is an essential step towards understanding social interactions and the construction of socially aware computer. This thesis addresses the problem of automatically recognizing roles of participants in multi-party recordings. The objective is to assign to each participant a role. All the proposed approaches use a similar strategy. They all start by segmenting the audio into turns. Those turns are used as basic analysis units. The next step is to extract features accounting for the organization of turns. The more sophisticated approaches extend the features extracted with features from either the prosody or the semantic. Finally, the mapping of people or turns to roles is done using statistical models. The goal of this thesis is to gain a better understanding of role recognition and we will investigate three aspects that can influence the performance of the system: We investigate the impact of modelling the dependency between the roles. We investigate the contribution of different modalities for the effectiveness of role recognition approach. We investigate the effectiveness of the approach for different scenarios. Three models are proposed and tested on three different corpora totalizing more than 90 hours of audio. The first contribution of this thesis is to investigate the combination of turn-taking features and semantic information for role recognition, improving the accuracy of role recognition from a baseline of 46.4% to 67.9% on the AMI meeting corpus. The second contribution is to use features extracted from the prosody to assign roles. The performance of this model is 89.7% on broadcast news and 87.0% on talk-shows. Finally, the third contribution is the development of a model robust to change in the social setting. This model achieved an accuracy of 86.7% on a database composed of a mixture of broadcast news and talk-shows

Media’s influence on the 21st century society: A global criminological systematic review

This investigation assumes that the media can reduce or spread criminal activities and tendencies based on how the concerned parties apply the policies and community standards that guide these platforms’ use. In total, 254 materials were gathered across several search systems between October 2021 and September 2022. Qualitative data were used from the selected materials to synthesise and summarise the content on the examined 21st-century events and media’s influence on crime. It is not possible to reject the premise that the media influences opinions on crime and the legal system. Nevertheless, the data reveals that no causal media effect can be directly established. However, the same data uncovers how media portrays an activity affects how people perceive it. Advances in technology, media, and criminology may have affected the analysis of records, including the time and quality of resources. More accurate and fair media coverage of crime would lead to a more informed and aware population. On the other hand, media houses that promote and reward good behaviour should be applauded. These two steps ensure the media cannot be ignored when assessing crime and how the public perceives it, as it can encourage crime and shift perceptions. Therefore, further research, stricter laws and policies, and community education on crime prevention and media screening are needed. The fact that unfavourable media coverage of crime can ruin a business, either directly or indirectly (consumer behaviour changes due to crime), makes this paper of utmost importance for businessmen, politicians, and local agencies.Esta dissertação presume que os media podem ser utilizados para reduzir ou difundir atividades ou tendências criminosas, dependendo da aplicação de políticas e padrões comunitários que influenciam tais plataformas. Foram utilizados 254 materiais reunidos em diversos sistemas de pesquisa entre outubro de 2021 e setembro de 2022. Estes compreendem publicações do século XXI que examinam a influência dos media nas práticas criminais e suas perceções. Apesar deste estudo não possibilitar estabelecer uma relação causal, não é, ainda assim, possível rejeitar a premissa de que os media influenciam as perceções face ao crime. Determina, contudo, que o modo como os media divulgam uma atividade afeta a perceção social face à mesma. Uma população mais informada e consciente depende de uma cobertura mediática mais fatual. Os media que promovem e recompensam o bom comportamento devem ser louvados. Os media não podem ser ignorados na avaliação do crime e da sua perceção, tendo o poder de incentivar a criminalidade e potenciar alterações nas perceções sociais. Consequentemente, é necessário investigar mais, aplicar leis e políticas mais rigorosas, e investir em programas de educação comunitária de prevenção à criminalidade e interpretação dos media. Esta dissertação é de elevada importância a empresários, políticos e outros órgãos locais, pelo fato de a cobertura desfavorável do crime pelos media poder arruinar um indivíduo, organização ou até um negócio, seja de forma direta (críticas ao estabelecimento) ou indireta (mudanças no comportamento do consumidor devido à ocorrência de crimes numa região)

Disciplining news practices in the age of metric power: a networked ethnographic study of everyday newswork in a Spanish media group

This thesis investigates the encounter of journalists with metrics in the quantified newsroom. Drawing on scholarship on news production, the critical political economy of media, the sociology of quantification and the Foucauldian approach to power and resistance, the thesis asks who decides which metrics matter in news production and what is the role of metrics in the newsroom. Drawing on a networked ethnography, the study examines the production and circulation of metrics within the Spanish media group Atresmedia and in particular in the news department of the television station La Sexta. In so doing, the thesis follows the flow of metrics into the newsroom and identifies the nodes that determine the repackaging of metrics. Finally, the thesis interrogates the journalists' consumption, interpretation and use of metrics. Empirically, the thesis is based on a 17-week networked ethnography, including 44 semi-structured interviews with journalists, data analysts and executives. The empirical data are presented in four levels: (1) The data ecosystem, (2) the institutional stage of metrics production, (3) the news team practices in the lights of metrics, and (4) the individual professional consumption of metrics. Drawing on the empirical analysis, the thesis argues that the metrics that arrive at the newsroom are crafted, re-packaged and re-signified to subtly convey disciplinary techniques that permeate the process of news production whilst also engendering resistance, with consequences for news products, news programming, audiences, and journalistic autonomy. Ultimately, the research contributes to understanding of the relationship between journalism and metrics. It also provides insights into the debates about the future of journalism in a challenging economic, social and political climate

Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief: Pre and post-crisis discourses of poverty, wealth, income inequality and the squeezed middle-class on U.K television news

Post financial crisis, economic and business news has generated conflicting narratives where, for example, bankers and corporate executives enjoy large salaries while ordinary people find their lifestyles under increasing pressure. Accordingly, the issues of income inequality, wealth and poverty have attracted increased scholarly attention. Citizens make sense of such issues via the media, and most often via TV news which is still the U.K’s primary news provider. Given that U.K broadcast media are bound by public service obligations, the intellectual puzzle addressed here is whether either side of the financial crisis (2007 and 2014), two TV news providers (BBC1 and ITV1) address financial news generally, and income inequality more specifically, in ways that serve all citizens. Large-scale content analyses are used to identify recurrent themes within economic, business and financial news, and stories containing elements of income inequality, poverty, wealth and the “squeezed middle”. To further explore how these issues are covered, typical cases are developed using critical discourse and multimodal analyses. The study finds that while economic and business news has increased and has been partially redefined by the crisis, income inequality is covered less in 2014 than in 2007, and since it is embedded within various news stories, the issue is not covered in ways helping citizens to make sense of causes and consequences. Despite indicators that “trickle down” economics is broken and that wealth remains concentrated among a few, even post-crisis, economic growth is presented as a universal solution to ease discomfort and inequality. Although coverage of business actors and corporations is often critical, the wider model of capitalism within which they operate remains unchallenged. In conclusion, despite the seismic financial events and normative expectations that they should discuss issues of social significance, because of institutional, economic and historic causal mechanisms, these channels do not provide any such critique