From Text Summarisation to Style-Specific Summarisation for Broadcast News

In this paper we report on a series of experiments investigating the path from text-summarisation to style-specific summarisation of spoken news stories. We show that the portability of traditional text summarisation features to broadcast news is dependent on the diffusiveness of the information in the broadcast news story. An analysis of two categories of news stories (containing only read speech or some spontaneous speech) demonstrates the importance of the style and the quality of the transcript, when extracting the summary-worthy information content. Further experiments indicate the advantages of doing style-specific summarisation of broadcast news.