Abstract. 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.

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This paper discusses the development of trainable statistical models for extracting content from television and radio news broadcasts. In particular we concentrate on statistical finite state models for identifying proper names and other named entities in broadcast speech. Two models are presented: the first represents name class information as a word attribute; the second represents both word-word and class-class transitions explicitly. A common n-gram based formulation is used for both models. The task of named entity identification is characterized by relatively sparse training data and issues related to smoothing are discussed. Experiments are reported using the DARPA/NIST Hub-4E evaluation for North American Broadcast News.

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Abstract. This paper presents a space-time extension of scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) originally applied to the 2-dimensional (2D) volumetric images. Most of the previous extensions dealt with 3-dimensional (3D) spacial information using a combination of a 2D detector and a 3D descriptor for applications such as medical image analysis. In this work we build a spatio-temporal difference-of-Gaussian (DoG) pyramid to detect the local extrema, aiming at processing video streams. Interest points are extracted not only from the spatial plane (xy) but also from the planes along the time axis (xt and yt). The space-time extension was evaluated using the human action classification task. Experiments with the KTH and the UCF sports datasets show that the approach was able to produce results comparable to the state-of-the-arts.