Event

Detecting and Summarizing Decisions in Human-Human Meetings

Raquel Fernandez

Stanford University

Monday, June 23, 2008
12:30

In an era where almost anything we do and say is recorded, the demand for automatic methods that process, understand and summarize information encoded in audio and video recordings of meetings is rapidly growing. Decision-making discussions constitute one of the key aspects of meeting interaction. In this talk I will present our ongoing research on modeling decisions in multi-party meetings and describe automatic processes to detect decision-making sub-dialogues and summarize their constituent parts. We propose an approach that takes into account the different roles utterances play in the decision-making process. We show that this structured approach outperforms the accuracy achieved by existing decision detection systems based on flat annotations, while enabling the extraction of more fine-grained information that can be used for concise summarization and reporting.