This article presents the problem of diacritic restoration (or diacritization) in the context of spell-checking, with the focus on an orthographically rich language such as Spanish. We argue that despite the large volume of work published on the topic of diacritization, currently available spell-checking tools have still not found a proper solution to the problem in those cases where both forms of a word are listed in the checker's dictionary. This is the case, for instance, when a word form exists with and without diacritics, such as continuo ‘continuous' and continuó ‘he/she/it continued', or when different diacritics make other word distinctions, as in continúo ‘I continue'. We propose a very simple solution based on a word bigram model derived from correctly typed Spanish texts and evaluate the ability of this model to restore diacritics in artificial as well as real errors. The case of diacritics is only meant to be an example of the possible applications for this idea, yet we believe that the same method could be applied to other kinds of orthographic or even grammatical errors. Moreover, given that no explicit linguistic knowledge is required, the proposed model can be used with other languages provided that a large normative corpus is available.

This article reports an intrinsic automatic summarization evaluation in the scientific lecture domain. The lecture takes place in a Smart Room that has access to different types of documents produced from different media. An evaluation framework is presented to analyze the performance of systems producing summaries answering a user need. Several ROUGE metrics are used and a manual content responsiveness evaluation was carried out in order to analyze the performance of the evaluated approaches. Various multilingual summarization approaches are analyzed showing that the use of different types of documents outperforms the use of transcripts. In fact, not using any part of the spontaneous speech transcription in the summary improves the performance of automatic summaries. Moreover, the use of semantic information represented in the different textual documents coming from different media helps to improve summary quality.