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<Paper uid="W04-2906">
  <Title>Assessing Prosodic and Text Features for Segmentation of Mandarin Broadcast News</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusion and Future Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have demonstrated the utility of prosody-only, textonly, and mixed text-prosody features for automatic topic segmentation of Mandarin Chinese. We have demonstrated the applicability of intonational prosodic features, speci cally pitch, intensity, pause and duration, to the identi cation of topic boundaries in a tone language. We observe similar effectiveness for all feature sets when all features are available, with slightly better classi cation accuracy for the hybrid text-prosody approach. These results indicate a synergistic combination of meaning and acoustic features. We further observe that the prosody-only and hybrid feature sets are much less sensitive to the absence of individual features, and, in particular, to silence features. These ndings indicate that prosodic features are robust cues to topic boundaries, both with and without textual cues.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> There is still substantial work to be done. We would like to integrate speaker identi cation for normalization and speaker change detection. We also plan to explore the integration of text and prosodic features for the identi cation of more ne-grained sub-topic structure, to provide more focused units for information retrieval, summarization, and anaphora resolution. We also plan to explore the interaction of prosodic and textual features with cues from other modalities, such as gaze and gesture, for robust segmentation of varied multi-modal data.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>