Spoken document summarization using relevant information

Extractive summarization usually automatically selects indicative sentences from a document according to a certain target summarization ratio, and then sequences them to form a summary. In this paper, we investigate the use of information from relevant documents retrieved from a contemporary text collection for each sentence of a spoken document to be summarized in a probabilistic generative framework for extractive spoken document summarization. In the proposed methods, the probability of a document being generated by a sentence is modeled by a hidden Markov model (HMM), while the retrieved relevant text documents are used to estimate the HMM´s parameters and the sentence´s prior probability. The results of experiments on Chinese broadcast news compiled in Taiwan show that the new methods outperform the previous HMM approach.