Summarizing Speech: A Comprehensive Survey

Fabian Retkowski, Maike Züfle, Andreas Sudmann, Dinah Pfau, Shinji Watanabe, Jan Niehues, Alexander Waibel


Abstract
Speech summarization has become an essential tool for efficiently managing and accessing the growing volume of spoken and audiovisual content. However, despite its increasing importance, speech summarization remains loosely defined. The field intersects with several research areas, including speech recognition, text summarization, and specific applications like meeting summarization. This survey not only examines existing datasets and evaluation protocols, which are crucial for assessing the quality of summarization approaches, but also synthesizes recent developments in the field, highlighting the shift from traditional systems to advanced models like fine-tuned cascaded architectures and end-to-end solutions. In doing so, we surface the ongoing challenges, such as the need for realistic evaluation benchmarks, multilingual datasets, and long-context handling.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1388
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
27263–27294
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1388/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fabian Retkowski, Maike Züfle, Andreas Sudmann, Dinah Pfau, Shinji Watanabe, Jan Niehues, and Alexander Waibel. 2025. Summarizing Speech: A Comprehensive Survey. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 27263–27294, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Summarizing Speech: A Comprehensive Survey (Retkowski et al., EMNLP 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1388.pdf
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