Topic segmentation research based on prosodic information has generally relied on hand-coded cues (with the notable exception of Hirschberg and Nakatani [1998]), or has not combined prosodic information with lexical cues (Litman and Passonneau [1995] is one example where lexical information was combined with hand-coded prosodic features for a related task).
the work presented here is the first that combines automatic extraction of both lexical and prosodic information for topic segmentation.