Meetings provide unique knowledge sharing opportunities and are an efficient way of interaction between people with different expertise areas. Such human communication in stored audio form has rapidly grown in recent years, providing ample source material for later use. In particular, the increased prominence of search as a basic user activity has meant that the ability to automatically browse, summarize, or graphically visualize various aspects of the spoken content has become far more important. There are several studies on representation and detection of various types of events in multiparty conversations, such as agreement/disagreements and decisions. However, there is no consensus on how to represent structure of meeting discussions, to be used later for human browsing or in further automatic processing, such as summarization.
This planning project works towards a research infrastructure for a better understanding of meeting structure, and aims to organize a community effort in the form of a workshop, to identify the consensus needs of the meeting processing research and education community, for enhancing the existing and widely used ICSI meetings corpus with annotations of structure of meeting discussions. Such annotations are critical in initiating research on automatic detection and annotation of meeting discussions, and would also be useful for research on meeting visualization, browsing and summarization. Furthermore, such an infrastructure would provide students and researchers in natural language and speech processing a framework to experiment with and enable social scientists interested in interactional structures to develop more robust analysis mechanisms. The workshop discussions will contribute to the decision on an annotation schema and the design of annotation guidelines, with a small set of sample annotated meetings, which will be made publicly available.
