Automated Statement Extraction from Press Briefings

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated system for extracting relevant statements from scientific press briefings, aiming to facilitate media coverage and journalistic tasks by identifying key claims within complex transcripts.

Contribution

It introduces a four-step procedure for claim-based statement extraction from press briefing transcripts, combining sentence splitting, claim detection, topic identification, and filtering.

Findings

Claim detection effectively identifies statements in press briefings.

Automatically extracted statements are often coherent but may require further review.

The system enhances efficiency in processing press briefing transcripts.

Abstract

Scientific press briefings are a valuable information source. They consist of alternating expert speeches, questions from the audience and their answers. Therefore, they can contribute to scientific and fact-based media coverage. Even though press briefings are highly informative, extracting statements relevant to individual journalistic tasks is challenging and time-consuming. To support this task, an automated statement extraction system is proposed. Claims are used as the main feature to identify statements in press briefing transcripts. The statement extraction task is formulated as a four-step procedure. First, the press briefings are split into sentences and passages, then claim sentences are identified through sequence classification. Subsequently, topics are detected, and the sentences are filtered to improve the coherence and assess the length of the statements. The results indicate that claim detection can be used to identify statements in press briefings. While many statements can be extracted automatically with this system, they are not always as coherent as needed to be understood without context and may need further review by knowledgeable persons.