Using virtual meeting structure to support summarisation

Abstract

Archiving meeting transcripts in databases is not always efficient. Users need to be able to catch up with past meetings quickly, and therefore it is non-productive to read the full meeting transcript from scratch. A summarisation of the meeting transcript is preferable but the lack of meeting structure may lead to missing information. Therefore, we have introduced a virtual meeting system that is characterised by features that provide the meeting session with structure and a summarisation system that applies a TextRank approach on the structured meeting transcripts. The agenda with timed items guides the conversation. Thus the item delineation and title can be considered as the key characteristics of a valuable summary. Results show that combining an extraction summarisation technique with meeting structure leads to a relevant summary.