Hello,
I have the impression that your colleague, John Murdie, has
successfully installed our software. Please let us know if you have
any feedback.
Dragomir
Ian Benest wrote:
>
> Subject: Summarization
>
> Dear Dr Radev
>
> I met Bill Byrne at Eurospeech in Denmark in September and we
> got to talking through a problem that I have. I got in touch
> with him afterwards and he suggested that I contact you.
>
> I'm not sure just how much I need to say to get your interest,
> so here goes. I have devised this idea of on-line lectures
> which are electronic slides with a voice-over synchronised with
> any necessary animation. So each slide has a number of speech
> fragments and each fragment has its transcription. I have a whole
> lecture module done in this way and retain most of the semantics
> including things like the semantics of the diagrams.
>
> I want to investigate the user-interface to two future tools
> and I'm not sure just what they're going to "look-and-feel"
> like - I suppose that's all part of the research. One tool
> will take the author of a lecture through what they have
> produced, critically assessing as it goes. The other will
> help people in a search query to find the slides that best
> match their query. In both cases speech will be used to
> augment the graphical output. I am already quite advanced
> as far as the evaluation of the lectures and the search
> engine is concerned.
>
> In both cases I want the system to seem as though it knows
> what the slide/lecture is about. I have used the Unix utility
> "style" to extract nouns from the transcripts. The utility
> doesn't do a good job so there is a fairly big stop list after
> running style. I hope to have access to some software that is
> supposed to get all the nouns with no errors and should be
> moving to use that software soon.
>
> At the moment the summarization amounts to: "this slide is about
> ..." followed by a list of nouns (perhaps with supporting
> adjectives). When you see the slide in action and read this
> "synopsis" you think "that's about right". When you read the
> "synopsis" without seeing the slide, I can't imagine what the
> slide is all about. Clearly I am losing vital information and
> that's where summarization comes in. I can, and do, extract slide
> titles which might be more enlightening and I have access to the
> text on the slide.
>
> The scripts for each slide are quite short and I probably want
> one or two sentences only. Any more and I'll bore the listener
> to death. I also expect that the summary should be less than
> fluent and more spontaneous.
>
> So what I'm after is software on Linux that can summarize small blocks
> of text to see if this solves my problem. I'm not sure what I can
> give in return. I think it unlikely that I would be able to help with
> summarization development, though the particular niche of possibly
> requiring more spontaneous speech might have some novelty.
>
> Can you help?
>
> Many thanks,
> Ian Benest
>
>
-- Dragomir R. Radev radev@umich.edu Assistant Professor of Information, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Linguistics, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Phone: 734-615-5225 Fax: 734-764-2475 http://www.si.umich.edu/~radev
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