Abstract: This research leads to the development of a system that generates minutes while the system and user interactively structure and summarize the discussion. The system can look back on a meeting from a specific viewpoint or purpose by sending an inquiry to the minutes, receiving the result, and performing a new operation. To improve the reusability of the minutes, it is necessary to understand the semantic relationships among utterances at a deep level. We therefore propose a novel tree structure called the discussion time-span tree for representing a hierarchical discussion based on the relative importance of utterances derived from the meeting. The discussion time-span tree is a binary tree, each leaf of which corresponds to an utterance. Adjacent relevant utterances are hierarchically grouped, and the most important utterance becomes a head. In this way, the tree represents the implicit meaning and intention contained in meeting records, and can be used for summarization. Our system aims to grasp the main point of the meeting by interactively manipulating this tree structure and giving different viewpoints to each system user. An evaluation of the important utterance extraction using the proposed system showed that the score of ROUGE-2 was higher than that of the existing document summarizing technique. In a subsequent user evaluation conducted with ten participants, we found that the system can be used to grasp conference contents efficiently. The results of both evaluations demonstrate the usefulness of the system.
Keywords: Knowledge representation, information structuralization, automatic summarization, information retrieval system
