SIGdial 2012

13th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Unsupervised Topic Modeling Approaches to Decision Summarization in Spoken Meetings

Presented by:
Lu Wang
Author(s):
Lu Wang, Claire Cardie

We present a token-level decision summarization framework that utilizes the latent topic structures of utterances to identify "summaryworthy" 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 decisionmaking process. Moreover, our proposed token-level summarization approach, which is able to remove redundancies within utterances, outperforms existing utterance ranking based summarization methods. Finally, context information is also investigated to add additional relevant information to the summary.