Recently abstractive spoken language summarization raises emerging research interest, and neural sequence-to-sequence approaches have brought significant performance improvement. However, summarizing long meeting transcripts remains challenging. Due to the large length of source contents and targeted summaries, neural models are prone to be distracted on the context, and produce summaries with degraded quality. Moreover, pre-trained language models with input length limitations cannot be readily applied to long sequences. In this work, we first analyze the linguistic characteristics of meeting transcripts on a representative corpus, and find that the sentences comprising the summary correlate with the meeting agenda. Based on this observation, we propose a dynamic sliding window strategy for meeting summarization. Experimental results show that performance benefit from the proposed method, and outputs obtain higher factual consistency than the base model.
Penn State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Text summarization helps readers capture salient information from documents, news, interviews, and meetings. However, most state-of-the-art pretrained language models (LM) are unable to efficiently process long text for many summarization tasks. In this paper, we propose Summ$^N$, a simple, flexible, and effective multi-stage framework for input texts that are longer than the maximum context length of typical pretrained LMs. Summ$^N$ first splits the data samples and generates a coarse summary in multiple stages and then produces the final fine-grained summary based on it. Our framework can pr…
Meetings are essential to modern organizations. Numerous meetings are held and recorded daily, more than can ever be comprehended. A meeting summarization system that identifies salient utterances from the transcripts to automatically generate meeting minutes can help. It empowers users to rapidly search and sift through large meeting collections. To date, the impact of domain terminology on the performance of meeting summarization remains understudied, despite that meetings are rich with domain knowledge. In this paper, we create gold-standard annotations for domain terminology on a sizable m…
Information overloading requires the need for summarizers to extract salient information from the text. Currently, there is an overload of dialogue data due to the rise of virtual communication platforms. The rise of Covid-19 has led people to rely on online communication platforms like Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, etc. to conduct their company meetings. Instead of going through the entire meeting transcripts, people can use meeting summarizers to select useful data. Nevertheless, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys in the field of meeting summarizers. In this survey, we aim to …
We present a novel unsupervised framework for focused meeting summarization that views the problem as an instance of relation extraction. We adapt an existing in-domain relation learner (Chen et al., 2011) by exploiting a set of task-specific constraints and features. We evaluate the approach on a decision summarization task and show that it outperforms unsupervised utterance-level extractive summarization baselines as well as an existing generic relation-extraction-based summarization method. Moreover, our approach produces summaries competitive with those generated by supervised methods in t…
The development of large and super-large language models, such as GPT-3, T5, Switch Transformer, ERNIE, etc., has significantly improved the performance of text generation. One of the important research directions in this area is the generation of texts with arguments. The solution of this problem can be used in business meetings, political debates, dialogue systems, for preparation of student essays. One of the main domains for these applications is the economic sphere. The key problem of the argument text generation for the Russian language is the lack of annotated argumentation corpora. In …
Meeting minutes record any subject matters discussed, decisions reached and actions taken at meetings. The importance of minuting cannot be overemphasized in a time when a significant number of meetings take place in the virtual space. In this paper, we present a sliding window approach to automatic generation of meeting minutes. It aims to tackle issues associated with the nature of spoken text, including lengthy transcripts and lack of document structure, which make it difficult to identify salient content to be included in the meeting minutes. Our approach combines a sliding window and a ne…
Automatic meeting summarization is becoming increasingly popular these days. The ability to automatically summarize meetings and to extract key information could greatly increase the efficiency of our work and life. In this paper, we experiment with different approaches to improve the performance of query-based meeting summarization. We started with HMNet\cite{hmnet}, a hierarchical network that employs both a word-level transformer and a turn-level transformer, as the baseline. We explore the effectiveness of pre-training the model with a large news-summarization dataset. We investigate addin…
Microsoft Cognitive Services Research Group（微软认知服务研究组）
With the abundance of automatic meeting transcripts, meeting summarization is of great interest to both participants and other parties. Traditional methods of summarizing meetings depend on complex multi-step pipelines that make joint optimization intractable. Meanwhile, there are a handful of deep neural models for text summarization and dialogue systems. However, the semantic structure and styles of meeting transcripts are quite different from articles and conversations. In this paper, we propose a novel abstractive summary network that adapts to the meeting scenario. We design a hierarchica…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Microsoft Cognitive Services Research（微软认知服务研究院）
Meetings are a key component of human collaboration. As increasing numbers of meetings are recorded and transcribed, meeting summaries have become essential to remind those who may or may not have attended the meetings about the key decisions made and the tasks to be completed. However, it is hard to create a single short summary that covers all the content of a long meeting involving multiple people and topics. In order to satisfy the needs of different types of users, we define a new query-based multi-domain meeting summarization task, where models have to select and summarize relevant spans…
We present a token-level decision summarization framework that utilizes the latent topic structures of utterances to identify "summary-worthy" words. Concretely, a series of unsupervised topic models is explored and experimental results show that fine-grained topic models, which discover topics at the utterance-level rather than the document-level, can better identify the gist of the decision-making process. Moreover, our proposed token-level summarization approach, which is able to remove redundancies within utterances, outperforms existing utterance ranking based summarization methods. Final…
The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Automatic summarization techniques on meeting conversations developed so far have been primarily extractive, resulting in poor summaries. To improve this, we propose an approach to generate abstractive summaries by fusing important content from several utterances. Any meeting is generally comprised of several discussion topic segments. For each topic segment within a meeting conversation, we aim to generate a one sentence summary from the most important utterances using an integer linear programming-based sentence fusion approach. Experimental results show that our method can generate more inf…
Meeting summarization is a challenging task due to its dynamic interaction nature among multiple speakers and lack of sufficient training data. Existing methods view the meeting as a linear sequence of utterances while ignoring the diverse relations between each utterance. Besides, the limited labeled data further hinders the ability of data-hungry neural models. In this paper, we try to mitigate the above challenges by introducing dialogue-discourse relations. First, we present a Dialogue Discourse-Dware Meeting Summarizer (DDAMS) to explicitly model the interaction between utterances in a me…
Although pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success and become a milestone in NLP, abstractive conversational summarization remains a challenging but less studied task. The difficulty lies in two aspects. One is the lack of large-scale conversational summary data. Another is that applying the existing pre-trained models to this task is tricky because of the structural dependence within the conversation and its informal expression, etc. In this work, we first build a large-scale (11M) pretraining dataset called RCS, based on the multi-person discussions in the Reddit communi…
University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
We introduce a novel graph-based framework for abstractive meeting speech summarization that is fully unsupervised and does not rely on any annotations. Our work combines the strengths of multiple recent approaches while addressing their weaknesses. Moreover, we leverage recent advances in word embeddings and graph degeneracy applied to NLP to take exterior semantic knowledge into account, and to design custom diversity and informativeness measures. Experiments on the AMI and ICSI corpus show that our system improves on the state-of-the-art. Code and data are publicly available, and our system…
Adapter-based Selective Knowledge Distillation for Federated Multi-domain Meeting Summarization
Research Center for Social Computing and Information Retrieval, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学社会计算与信息检索研究中心）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；School of Computing, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学计算机学院）
This paper addresses the problem of summarizing decisions in spoken meetings: our goal is to produce a concise {\it decision abstract} for each meeting decision. We explore and compare token-level and dialogue act-level automatic summarization methods using both unsupervised and supervised learning frameworks. In the supervised summarization setting, and given true clusterings of decision-related utterances, we find that token-level summaries that employ discourse context can approach an upper bound for decision abstracts derived directly from dialogue acts. In the unsupervised summarization s…
Pre-trained language models have established the state-of-the-art on various natural language processing tasks, including dialogue summarization, which allows the reader to quickly access key information from long conversations in meetings, interviews or phone calls. However, such dialogues are still difficult to handle with current models because the spontaneity of the language involves expressions that are rarely present in the corpora used for pre-training the language models. Moreover, the vast majority of the work accomplished in this field has been focused on English. In this work, we pr…
Reasoning or Not? A Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning LLMs for Dialogue Summarization
Faculty of Applied Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University（澳门理工大学应用科学学院）；Computer Science and Communication Research Center, School of Technology and Management, Polytechnic of Leiria（莱里亚理工学院技术与管理学院计算机科学与通信研究中心）；Institute of International Language Services Studies, Macau Millennium College（澳门 millennium 学院国际语言服务研究学院）；CISUC, Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra（科英布拉大学信息工程系 CISUC）
Ubiqus Labs（Ubiqus实验室）；LIUM – Le Mans Université（勒芒大学计算机科学实验室）；Université de Paris（巴黎大学）；LIA – Avignon Université（阿维尼翁大学计算机科学实验室）
Supervised approaches for Neural Abstractive Summarization require large annotated corpora that are costly to build. We present a French meeting summarization task where reports are predicted based on the automatic transcription of the meeting audio recordings. In order to build a corpus for this task, it is necessary to obtain the (automatic or manual) transcription of each meeting, and then to segment and align it with the corresponding manual report to produce training examples suitable for training. On the other hand, we have access to a very large amount of unaligned data, in particular r…
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Despite the recent developments on neural summarization systems, the underlying logic behind the improvements from the systems and its corpus-dependency remains largely unexplored. Position of sentences in the original text, for example, is a well known bias for news summarization. Following in the spirit of the claim that summarization is a combination of sub-functions, we define three sub-aspects of summarization: position, importance, and diversity and conduct an extensive analysis of the biases of each sub-aspect with respect to the domain of nine different summarization corpora (e.g., new…
In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for direct extractive speech-to-speech summarization, ESSumm, which is an unsupervised model without dependence on intermediate transcribed text. Different from previous methods with text presentation, we are aimed at generating a summary directly from speech without transcription. First, a set of smaller speech segments are extracted based on speech signal's acoustic features. For each candidate speech segment, a distance-based summarization confidence score is designed for latent speech representation measure. Specifically, we leverage the off-t…
Segment-level Tree Search for Long Meeting Document Summarization
GSAI, POSTECH（浦项科技大学人工智能研究院）；CSE, POSTECH（浦项科技大学计算机科学与工程系）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；ETH AI Center（苏黎世联邦理工学院人工智能中心）；Agentic AI Lab, KT（KT公司智能体人工智能实验室）；LILT（LILT公司）
Speech Lab of DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院语音实验室）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Listening to long video/audio recordings from video conferencing and online courses for acquiring information is extremely inefficient. Even after ASR systems transcribe recordings into long-form spoken language documents, reading ASR transcripts only partly speeds up seeking information. It has been observed that a range of NLP applications, such as keyphrase extraction, topic segmentation, and summarization, significantly improve users' efficiency in grasping important information. The meeting scenario is among the most valuable scenarios for deploying these spoken language processing (SLP) …
Creating abstractive summaries from meeting transcripts has proven to be challenging due to the limited amount of labeled data available for training neural network models. Moreover, Transformer-based architectures have proven to beat state-of-the-art models in summarizing news data. In this paper, we utilize a Transformer-based Pointer Generator Network to generate abstract summaries for meeting transcripts. This model uses 2 LSTMs as an encoder and a decoder, a Pointer network which copies words from the inputted text, and a Generator network to produce out-of-vocabulary words (hence making …
Westlake University（西湖大学）；Sichuan Lan-bridge Information Technology Co., Ltd.（四川蓝桥信息技术有限公司）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Michigan, Ann Arbor（密歇根大学安娜堡分校）
We propose the shared task of cross-lingual conversation summarization, \emph{ConvSumX Challenge}, opening new avenues for researchers to investigate solutions that integrate conversation summarization and machine translation. This task can be particularly useful due to the emergence of online meetings and conferences. We construct a new benchmark, covering 2 real-world scenarios and 3 language directions, including a low-resource language. We hope that \emph{ConvSumX} can motivate researches to go beyond English and break the barrier for non-English speakers to benefit from recent advances of…
Summarization is a challenging problem, and even more challenging is to manually create, correct, and evaluate the summaries. The severity of the problem grows when the inputs are multi-party dialogues in a meeting setup. To facilitate the research in this area, we present ALIGNMEET, a comprehensive tool for meeting annotation, alignment, and evaluation. The tool aims to provide an efficient and clear interface for fast annotation while mitigating the risk of introducing errors. Moreover, we add an evaluation mode that enables a comprehensive quality evaluation of meeting minutes. To the best …
Neural abstractive summarization has been increasingly studied, where the prior work mainly focused on summarizing single-speaker documents (news, scientific publications, etc). In dialogues, there are different interactions between speakers, which are usually defined as dialogue acts. The interactive signals may provide informative cues for better summarizing dialogues. This paper proposes to explicitly leverage dialogue acts in a neural summarization model, where a sentence-gated mechanism is designed for modeling the relationship between dialogue acts and the summary. The experiments show t…
