Incorporating proximity information in relevance language modeling for extractive speech summarization

Extractive speech summarization refers to automatic selection of an indicative set of sentences from a spoken document so as to offer a concise digest covering the most salient aspects of the original document. The language modeling (LM) framework alongside the pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) technique has emerged as a promising line of research for conducting extractive speech summarization in an unsupervised manner, showing some preliminary success. This paper extends such a general line of research and its main contributions are two-fold. First, we explore several effective formulations of proximity-based cues for use in the sentence modeling process involved in the LM-based summarization framework. Second, the utilities of the methods instantiated from the LM-based summarization framework and several well-practiced state-of-the-art methods are analyzed and compared extensively. The empirical results suggest the effectiveness of our methods.