Accessing Information in Spoken Audio April 19-20, 1999 Cambridge, UK

Summarisation of Spoken Audio Through Information Extraction

Robin Valenza (1), Tony Robinson (2), Marianne Hickey (3), and Roger Tucker (3)

(1) English Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
(2) Cambridge University Engineering Department, Cambridge, UK
(3) Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK

Automatic summarisation of spoken audio is a fairly new research pursuit, in large part due to the relative novelty of technology for accurately decoding audio into text. Techniques that account for the peculiarities and potential ambiguities of decoded audio (high error rates, lack of syntactic boundaries) appear promising for culling summary information from audio for content-based browsing and skimming. This paper combines acoustic confidence measures with simple information retrieval and extraction techniques in order to obtain accurate, readable summaries of broadcast news programs. It also demonstrates how extracted summaries, full-text speech recogniser output and audio files can be usefully linked together through an audio-visual interface. The results suggest that information extraction based on statistical information can produce viable summaries of decoded audio.

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Bibliographic reference.  Valenza, Robin / Robinson, Tony / Hickey, Marianne / Tucker, Roger (1999): "Summarisation of spoken audio through information extraction", In Access-Audio-1999, 111-116.