Automatic speech summarization based on sentence extraction and compaction

This paper proposes a new automatic speech summarization method having two stages: important sentence extraction and sentence compaction. Relatively important sentences are extracted based on the amount of information and the confidence measures of constituent words, and the set of extracted sentences is compressed by our sentence compaction method. The sentence compaction is performed by selecting a word set that maximizes a summarization score consisting of the amount of information and the confidence measure of each word, the linguistic likelihood of word strings, and the word concatenation probability. The selected words are concatenated to create a summary. Effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed by summarizing a spontaneous presentation.