Intonational phrases for speech summarization

Abstract

Extractive speech summarization approaches select relevant segments of spoken documents and concatenate them to generate a summary. The extraction unit chosen, whether a sentence, syntactic constituent, or other segment, has a significant impact on the overall quality and fluency of the summary. Even though sentences tend to be the choice of most the extractive speech summarizers, in this paper, we present the results of an empirical study indicating that intonational phrases are better units of extraction for summarization. Our study compared four types of input segmentation: sentences, two pause-based segmentation, and intonational phrases (IP). We found that IPs are the best candidates for extractive summarization, improving over the second highest-performing approach, sentence-based summarization, by 8.2% F-measure. Copyright © 2008 ISCA.