We assess the current state of the art in speech summarization, by comparing a typical summarizer on two different domains: lecture data and the SWITCHBOARD corpus. Our results cast significant doubt on the merits of this area's accepted evaluation standards in termms of: baselines chosen, the correspondence of results to our intuition of what "summaries" should be, and the value of adding speech-related features to summarizers that already use transcripts from automatic speech recognition (ASR) system.

We show that further error rate reduction can be obtained by using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We first present a concise description of the basic CNN and explain how it can be used for speech recognition. We further propose a limited-weight-sharing scheme that can better model speech features. The special structure such as local connectivity, weight sharing, and pooling in CNNs exhibits some degree of invariance to small shifts of speech features along the frequency axis, which is important to deal with speaker and environment variations.

Some of the most sensitive information we generate is either written or spoken using natural language. Privacy-preserving methods for natural language processing are therefore crucial, especially considering the ever-growing number of data breaches. However, there has been little work in this area up until now. In fact, no privacy-preserving methods have been proposed for many of the most basic NLP tasks. We propose a method for calculating character bigram and trigram probabilities over sensitive data using homomorphic encryption.

We propose a set of baseline heuristics for identifying genuinely tabular information and news links in HTML documents. A prototype implementation of these heuristics is described for delivering content from news providers' home pages to a narrow-bandwidth device such as a portable digital assistant or cellular phone display. Its evaluation on 75 Web sites is provided, along with a discussion of topics for future research.

Universities have long relied on written text to share knowledge. As more lectures are made available on-line, these must be accompanied by textual transcripts in order to provide the same access to information as textbooks. While Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is a cost-effective method to deliver transcriptions, its accuracy for lectures is not yet satisfactory. One approach for improving lecture ASR is to build smaller, topic-dependent Language Models (LMs) and combine them (through LM interpolation or hypothesis space combination) with general-purpose, large-vocabulary LMs. In this paper, we propose a simple solution for lecture ASR with similar or better Word Error Rate reductions (as well as topic-specific keyword identification accuracies) than combination-based approaches. Our method eliminates the need for two types of LMs by exploiting the lecture slides to collect a web corpus appropriate for modelling both the conversational and the topic-specific styles of lectures.