ISCA Archive SLaTE 2023
ISCA Archive SLaTE 2023

Unsupervised Multilingual Topic Segmentation of Video Lectures: What can Hierarchical Labels tell us about the Performance?

Steffen Freisinger, Fabian Schneider, Aaricia Herygers, Munir Georges, Tobias Bocklet, Korbinian Riedhammer

The current shift from in-person to online education, e.g., through video lectures, requires novel techniques for quickly searching for and navigating through media content. At this point, an automatic segmentation of the videos into thematically coherent units can be beneficial. Like in a book, the topics in an educational video are often structured hierarchically. There are larger topics, which in turn are divided into different subtopics. We thus propose a metric that considers the hierarchical levels in the reference segmentation when evaluating segmentation algorithms. In addition, we propose a multilingual, unsupervised topic segmentation approach and evaluate it on three datasets with English, Portuguese and German lecture videos. We achieve WindowDiff scores of up to 0.373 and show the usefulness of our hierarchical metric.