Story Boundary Detection Research Articles

Automatic Story Segmentation for TV News Video Using Multiple Modalities

While video content is often stored in rather large files or broadcasted in continuous streams, users are often interested in retrieving only a particular passage on a topic of interest to them. It is, therefore, necessary to split video documents or streams into shorter segments corresponding to appropriate retrieval units. We propose here a method for the automatic segmentation of TV news videos into stories. A-multiple-descriptor based segmentation approach is proposed. The selected multimodal features are complementary and give good insights about story boundaries. Once extracted, these features are expanded with a local temporal context and combined by an early fusion process. The story boundaries are then predicted using machine learning techniques. We investigate the system by experiments conducted using TRECVID 2003 data and protocol of the story boundary detection task, and we show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods while requiring a very small amount of manual annotation.

Discovering salient prosodic cues and their interactions for automatic story segmentation in Mandarin broadcast news

This paper investigates speech prosody for automatic story segmentation in Mandarin broadcast news. Prosodic cues effectively used in English story segmentation deserve a re-investigation since the lexical tones of Mandarin may complicate the expressions of pitch declination and reset. Our data-oriented study shows that story boundaries cannot be clearly discriminated from utterance boundaries by speaker normalized pitch features due to their large variations across different Mandarin syllable tones. We thus propose to use speaker- and tone-normalized pitch features that can provide clear separations between utterance and story boundaries. Our study also shows that speaker-normalized pause duration is quite effective to separate between story and utterance boundaries, while speaker-normalized speech energy and syllable duration are not effective. Experiments using decision trees for story boundary detection reinforce the difference between English and Chinese, i.e., speaker- and tone-normalized pitch features should be favorably adopted in Mandarin story segmentation. We show that the combination of different prosodic cues can achieve a very high F-measure of 93.04% due to the complementarity between pause, pitch and energy. Analysis of the decision tree uncovered five major heuristics that show how speakers jointly utilize pause duration and pitch to separate speech into stories.

A Cascaded Broadcast News Highlighter

This paper presents a fully automatic news skimming system which takes a broadcast news audio stream and provides the user with the segmented, structured, and highlighted transcript. This constitutes a system with three different, cascading stages: converting the audio stream to text using an automatic speech recognizer, segmenting into utterances and stories, and finally determining which utterance should be highlighted using a saliency score. Each stage must operate on the erroneous output from the previous stage in the system, an effect which is naturally amplified as the data progresses through the processing stages. We present a large corpus of transcribed broadcast news data enabling us to investigate to which degree information worth highlighting survives this cascading of processes. Both extrinsic and intrinsic experimental results indicate that mistakes in the story boundary detection has a strong impact on the quality of highlights, whereas erroneous utterance boundaries cause only minor problems. Further, the difference in transcription quality does not affect the overall performance greatly.

Automatic multimedia indexing: combining audio, speech, and visual information to index broadcast news

This paper describes an indexing system that automatically creates metadata for multimedia broadcast news content by integrating audio, speech, and visual information. The automatic multimedia content indexing system includes acoustic segmentation (AS), automatic speech recognition (ASR), topic segmentation (TS), and video indexing features. The new spectral-based features and smoothing method in the AS module improved the speech detection performance from the audio stream of the input news content. In the speech recognition module, automatic selection of acoustic models achieved both a low WER, as with parallel recognition using multiple acoustic models, and fast recognition, as with the single acoustic model. The TS method using word concept vectors achieved more accurate results than the conventional method using local word frequency vectors. The information integration module provides the functionality of integrating results from the AS module, TS module, and SC module. The story boundary detection accuracy was improved by combining it with the AS results and the SC results compared to the sole TS results