Maximum entropy segmentation of broadcast news

The paper presents an automatic system for structuring and preparing a news broadcast for applications such as speech summarization, browsing, archiving and information retrieval. This process comprises transcribing the audio using an automatic speech recognizer and subsequently segmenting the text into utterances and topics. A maximum entropy approach is used to build statistical models for both utterance and topic segmentation. The experimental work addresses the effect on performance of the topic boundary detector of three factors - the types of feature used, the quality of the ASR transcripts, and the quality of the utterance boundary detector. The results show that the topic segmentation is not affected severely by transcript errors, whereas errors in utterance segmentation are more devastating.