Automatic speech summarization based on word significance and linguistic likelihood

This paper proposes a new method of automatically summarizing speech by extracting a limited number of relatively important words from its automatic transcription according to a target compression ratio for the number of characters. To determine a word set to be extracted, we define a summarization score consisting of a topic score (significance measure) of words and a linguistic score (likelihood) of the word concatenation. A set of words maximizing the score is efficiently selected using a dynamic programming (DP) technique. Japanese broadcast news speech transcribed using a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system was summarized. As a result 86% of important words in the original speech were correctly included in the summarizing sentences and 72% of the summarizing sentences could maintain the meanings of the original speech under the 60-70% summarization condition