CI-P: Collaborative Research: Summarizing Opinion and Speaker Attitude in Speech

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

As part of this planning project, the PIs test the feasibility of collecting a corpus of conversational speech including both broadcast and telephone conversations. The corpus is annotated to support research in extractive and abstractive summarization of opinion and attitude in speech. The goal of the pilot annotation effort is the adaptation and refinement of current opinion and attitude annotation schemes for conversational data. The PIs are also organizing a workshop to be held at the 2011 meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics during which they plan to solicit annotation desiderata and feedback from researchers who are the future users of the resource. The pilot annotations include abstractive and extractive summaries, rich mark-up with existing automatic tools for prosodic event detection, discourse relations, topic words and extractive summaries from current baselines. It is increasingly important to track opinions and information on a wide spectrum of issues, and increasingly difficult to do so in the face of enormous amounts of information in textual and audio form. However, speech data is notoriously hard to search using current technologies, so developing new tools for this type of speech search is particularly important. The corpus the PIs are developing will make possible the development of automatic techniques to deal with this problem. Users will benefit from better tools to identify and summarize opinions that concern their daily choices related to health, diet, purchases, and the environment.