This paper addresses the problem of summarizing decisions in spoken meetings: our goal is to produce a concise 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 setting,we find that summaries based on unsupervised partitioning of decision-related utterances perform comparably to those based on partitions generated using supervised techniques (0.22 ROUGE-F1 using LDA-based topic models vs. 0.23 using SVMs).
From the Publisher: Until now, most discourse researchers have assumed that full semantic understanding is necessary to derive the discourse structure of texts. This book documents the first serious attempt to construct automatically and use nonsemantic computational structures for text summarization. Daniel Marcu develops a semantics-free theoretical framework that is both general enough to be applicable to naturally occurring texts and concise enough to facilitate an algorithmic approach to discourse analysis. He presents and evaluates two discourse parsing methods: one uses manually written rules that reflect common patterns of usage of cue phrases such as "however" and "in addition to"; the other uses rules that are learned automatically from a corpus of discourse structures. By means of a psycholinguistic experiment, Marcu demonstrates how a discourse-based summarizer identifies the most important parts of texts at levels of performance that are close to those of humans. Marcu also discusses how the automatic derivation of discourse structures may be used to improve the performance of current natural language generation, machine translation, summarization, question answering, and information retrieval systems. From the Publisher: Text summarization is the process of distilling the most important information from a source to produce an abridged version for a particular user or task.. "Until now there has been no state-of-the-art collection of the most important writings in automatic text summarization. This book presents the key developments in the field in an integrated framework and suggests future research areas. The book is organized into six sections. Classical Approaches, Corpus-Based Approaches, Exploiting Discourse Structure, Knowledge-Rich Approaches, Evaluation Methods, and New Summarization Problem Areas.