Project for production of closed-caption TV programs for the hearing impaired

Abstract

We describe an on-going project whose primary aim is to establish the technology of producing closed captions for TV news programs efficiently using natural language processing and speech recognition techniques for the benefit of the hearing impaired in Japan. The project is supported by the Telecommunications Advancement Organisation of Japan with the help of the ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.We propose natural language and speech processing techniques should be used for efficient closed caption production of TV programs. They enable us to summarise TV news texts into captions automatically, and synchronise TV news texts with speech and video automatically. Then the captions are superimposed on the screen.We propose a combination of shallow methods for the summarisation. For all the sentences in the original text, an importance measure is computed based on key words in the text to determine which sentences are important. If some parts of the sentences are judged unimportant, they are shortened or deleted. We also propose keyword pair model for the synchronisation between text and speech.