Identification of Important Utterances in Narrative Speech Using Attentive Listening Responses

Since narratives contain a variety of knowledge, it is useful to record their contents. It is difficult to read the transcription even if the narrative speech is transcribed directly because the transcription contains redundant contents. Thus, it is effective to summarize the narrative transcriptions. This paper proposes a method for identifying important utterances in narratives with the aim of summarizing them. The method uses not only the narrative by the speaker but also the attentive listening responses by the listeners for identifying the important utterances. Attentive listening responses are conversational responses to positively show that listeners are attentively listening to the narratives, e.g., back-channel feedbacks. The more important an utterance in a narrative is, the more likely the listeners seem to react to it. In this study, we focus on attentive listening responses as the listener’s reactions. We experimentally evaluated the effectiveness of using attentive listening responses in identifying important utterances in narratives.