ESSumm: Extractive Speech Summarization from Untranscribed Meeting

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for direct extractive speech-to-speech summarization, ESSumm, which is an unsupervised model without dependence on intermediate transcribed text. Different from previous methods with text presentation, we are aimed at generating a summary directly from speech without transcription. First, a set of smaller speech segments are extracted based on speech signal's acoustic features. For each candidate speech segment, a distance-based summarization confidence score is designed for latent speech representation measure. Specifically, we leverage the off-the-shelf self-supervised convolutional neural network to extract the deep speech features from raw audio. Our approach automatically predicts the optimal sequence of speech segments that capture the key information with a target summary length. Extensive results on two well-known meeting datasets (AMI and ICSI corpora) show the effectiveness of our direct speech-based method to improve the summarization quality with untranscribed data. We also observe that our unsupervised speech-based method even performs on par with recent transcript-based summarization approaches, where extra speech recognition is required.