Text Summarization and Speech Synthesis for the Automated Generation of Personalized Audio Presentations

In today’s fast-paced world, users face the challenge of having to consume a lot of content in a short time. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that content is scattered in a range of different languages and locations. This research addresses these challenges using a number of natural language processing techniques: adapting content using automatic text summarization; enhancing content accessibility through machine translation; and altering the delivery modality through speech synthesis. This paper introduces Lean-back Learning (LbL), an information system that delivers automatically generated audio presentations for consumption in a “lean-back” fashion, i.e. hands-busy, eyes-busy situations. These presentations are personalized and are generated using multilingual multi-document text summarization. The paper discusses the system’s components and algorithms, in addition to initial system evaluations.