Exploring the style-technique interaction in extractive summarization of broadcast news

In this paper we seek to explore the interaction between the style of a broadcast news story and its summarization technique. We report the performance of three different summarization techniques on broadcast news stories, which are split into planned speech and spontaneous speech. The initial results indicate that some summarization techniques work better for the documents with spontaneous speech than for those with planned speech. Even for human beings some documents are inherently difficult to summarize. We observe this correlation between degree of difficulty in summarizing and performance of the three automatic summarizers. Given the high frequency of named entities in broadcast news and even greater number of references to these named entities, we also gauge the effect of named entity and co-reference resolution in a news story, on the performance of these summarizers.