Automatic Linefeed Insertion for Improving Readability of Lecture Transcript

The development of a captioning system that supports the real-time understanding of monologue speech such as lectures and commentaries is required. In monologues, since a sentence tends to be long, each sentence is often displayed in multi lines on the screen and becomes unreadable. In the case, it is necessary to insert linefeeds into a text so that the text becomes easy to read. This paper proposes a technique for inserting linefeeds into a Japanese spoken monologue sentence as an elemental technique to generate the readable captions. Our method inserts linefeeds into a sentence by applying the rules based on morphemes, dependencies and clause boundaries. We established the rules by circumstantially investigating the corpus annotated with linefeeds. An experiment using Japanese monologue corpus has shown the effectiveness of our rules.