Are extractive text summarisation techniques portable to broadcast news?

Abstract

In this paper we report on a series of experiments which compare the effect of individual features on both text and speech summarisation, the effect of basing the speech summaries on automatic speech recognition transcripts with varying word error rates, and the effect of summarisation approach and transcript source on summary quality. We show that classical text summarisation features (based on stylistic and content information) are portable to broadcast news. However, the quality of the speech transcripts as well as the difference in information structure between broadcast and newspaper news affect the usability of the individual features.