MeetingBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Meeting Summarization

Yebowen Hu, Timothy Ganter, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Franck Dernoncourt, Hassan Foroosh, Fei Liu


Abstract
As the number of recorded meetings increases, it becomes increasingly important to utilize summarization technology to create useful summaries of these recordings. However, there is a crucial lack of annotated meeting corpora for developing this technology, as it can be hard to collect meetings, especially when the topics discussed are confidential. Furthermore, meeting summaries written by experienced writers are scarce, making it hard for abstractive summarizers to produce sensible output without a reliable reference. This lack of annotated corpora has hindered the development of meeting summarization technology. In this paper, we present MeetingBank, a new benchmark dataset of city council meetings over the past decade. MeetingBank is unique among other meeting corpora due to its divide-and-conquer approach, which involves dividing professionally written meeting minutes into shorter passages and aligning them with specific segments of the meeting. This breaks down the process of summarizing a lengthy meeting into smaller, more manageable tasks. The dataset provides a new testbed of various meeting summarization systems and also allows the public to gain insight into how council decisions are made. We make the collection, including meeting video links, transcripts, reference summaries, agenda, and other metadata, publicly available to facilitate the development of better meeting summarization techniques.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.906
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16409–16423
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.906
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.906
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yebowen Hu, Timothy Ganter, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Franck Dernoncourt, Hassan Foroosh, and Fei Liu. 2023. MeetingBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Meeting Summarization. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 16409–16423, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MeetingBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Meeting Summarization (Hu et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp22-frontmatter/2023.acl-long.906.pdf
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 https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp22-frontmatter/2023.acl-long.906.mp4