Spoken language condensation in the 21st century

While the field of Information Retrieval originally had the search for the most relevant documents in mind, it has become increasingly clear that in many instances, what the user wants is a piece of coherent information, derived from a set of relevant documents and possibly other sources. Reducing relevant documents, passages, and sentences to their core is the task of text summarization or information condensation. Applying text-based technologies to speech is not always workable and often not enough to capture speech specific phenomena. In this paper, we will contrast speech summarization with text summarization, give an overview of the history of speech summarization, its current state, and, finally, sketch possible avenues as well as remaining challenges in future research.