A Multi-layered Summarization System for Multi-media Archives by Understanding and Structuring of Chinese Spoken Documents

The multi-media archives are very difficult to be shown on the screen, and very difficult to retrieve and browse. It is therefore important to develop technologies to summarize the entire archives in the network content to help the user in browsing and retrieval. In a recent paper [1] we proposed a complete set of multi-layered technologies to handle at least some of the above issues: (1) Automatic Generation of Titles and Summaries for each of the spoken documents, such that the spoken documents become much more easier to browse, (2) Global Semantic Structuring of the entire spoken document archive, offering to the user a global picture of the semantic structure of the archive, and (3) Query-based Local Semantic Structuring for the subset of the spoken documents retrieved by the user’s query, providing the user the detailed semantic structure of the relevant spoken documents given the query he entered. The Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) is found to be helpful. This paper presents an initial prototype system for Chinese archives with the functions mentioned above, in which the broadcast news archive in Mandarin Chinese is taken as the example archive.