Segmentation of Automatically Transcribed Broadcast News Text

Expertise in the automatic transcription of broadcast speech has progressed to the point of being able to use the resulting transcripts for information retrieval purposes. In this paper, we describe the Segmentation system used by Dragon Systems in the Segmentation task of the 1998 TDT evaluation, highlighting improvements made since the September 1998 dryrun. Segmentation of closed-caption and human transcripts of news is contrasted with the results of segmenting the ASR transcripts. This will be followed by a discussion of the metric, in particular how the value of the segmentation metric relates to the value of the tracking metric, when the these latter two tasks are performed on automatically segmented ASR text, rather than the ASR text with correctly marked boundaries.