Meeting summarization has become a critical task since digital encounters have become a common practice. Large language models (LLMs) show great potential in summarization, offering enhanced coherence and context understanding compared to traditional methods. However, they still struggle to maintain relevance and avoid hallucination. We introduce a multi-LLM correction approach for meeting summarization using a two-phase process that mimics the human review process: mistake identification and summary refinement. We release QMSum Mistake, a dataset of 200 automatically generated meeting summaries annotated by humans on nine error types, including structural, omission, and irrelevance errors. Our experiments show that these errors can be identified with high accuracy by an LLM. We transform identified mistakes into actionable feedback to improve the quality of a given summary measured by relevance, informativeness, conciseness, and coherence. This post-hoc refinement effectively improves summary quality by leveraging multiple LLMs to validate output quality. Our multi-LLM approach for meeting summarization shows potential for similar complex text generation tasks requiring robustness, action planning, and discussion towards a goal.

The quality of meeting summaries generated by natural language generation (NLG) systems is hard to measure automatically. Established metrics such as ROUGE and BERTScore have a relatively low correlation with human judgments and fail to capture nuanced errors. Recent studies suggest using large language models (LLMs), which have the benefit of better context understanding and adaption of error definitions without training on a large number of human preference judgments. However, current LLM-based evaluators risk masking errors and can only serve as a weak proxy, leaving human evaluation the gold standard despite being costly and hard to compare across studies. In this work, we present MESA, an LLM-based framework employing a three-step assessment of individual error types, multi-agent discussion for decision refinement, and feedback-based self-training to refine error definition understanding and alignment with human judgment. We show that MESA’s components enable thorough error detection, consistent rating, and adaptability to custom error guidelines. Using GPT-4o as its backbone, MESA achieves mid to high Point-Biserial correlation with human judgment in error detection and mid Spearman and Kendall correlation in reflecting error impact on summary quality, on average 0.25 higher than previous methods. The framework’s flexibility in adapting to custom error guidelines makes it suitable for various tasks with limited human-labeled data.

Meeting summarization suffers from limited high-quality data, mainly due to privacy restrictions and expensive collection processes. We address this gap with FAME, a dataset of 500 meetings in English and 300 in German produced by MIMIC, our new multi-agent meeting synthesis framework that generates meeting transcripts on a given knowledge source by defining psychologically grounded participant profiles, outlining the conversation, and orchestrating a large language model (LLM) debate. A modular post-processing step refines these outputs, mitigating potential repetitiveness and overly formal tones, ensuring coherent, credible dialogues at scale. We also propose a psychologically grounded evaluation framework assessing naturalness, social behavior authenticity, and transcript difficulties. Human assessments show that FAME approximates real-meeting spontaneity (4.5/5 in naturalness), preserves speaker-centric challenges (3/5 in spoken language), and introduces richer information-oriented difficulty (4/5 points in difficulty). These findings show FAME is a good and scalable proxy for real-world meeting conditions. It enables new test scenarios for meeting summarization research and other conversation-centric applications in tasks requiring conversation data or simulating social scenarios under behavioral constraints.

Meeting summarization is crucial in digital communication, but existing solutions struggle with salience identification to generate personalized, workable summaries, and context understanding to fully comprehend the meetings’ content.Previous attempts to address these issues by considering related supplementary resources (e.g., presentation slides) alongside transcripts are hindered by models’ limited context sizes and handling the additional complexities of the multi-source tasks, such as identifying relevant information in additional files and seamlessly aligning it with the meeting content.This work explores multi-source meeting summarization considering supplementary materials through a three-stage large language model approach: identifying transcript passages needing additional context, inferring relevant details from supplementary materials and inserting them into the transcript, and generating a summary from this enriched transcript.Our multi-source approach enhances model understanding, increasing summary relevance by ~9% and producing more content-rich outputs.We introduce a personalization protocol that extracts participant characteristics and tailors summaries accordingly, improving informativeness by ~10%.This work further provides insights on performance-cost trade-offs across four leading model families, including edge-device capable options.Our approach can be extended to similar complex generative tasks benefitting from additional resources and personalization, such as dialogue systems and action planning.

Meeting summarization has become a critical task considering the increase in online interactions. Despite new techniques being proposed regularly, the evaluation of meeting summarization techniques relies on metrics not tailored to capture meeting-specific errors, leading to ineffective assessment. This paper explores what established automatic metrics capture and the errors they mask by correlating metric scores with human evaluations across a comprehensive error taxonomy. We start by reviewing the literature on English meeting summarization to identify key challenges, such as speaker dynamics and contextual turn-taking, and error types, including missing information and linguistic inaccuracy, concepts previously loosely defined in the field. We then examine the relationship between these challenges and errors using human annotated transcripts and summaries from encoder-decoder-based and autoregressive Transformer models on the QMSum dataset. Experiments reveal that different model architectures respond variably to the challenges, resulting in distinct links between challenges and errors. Current established metrics struggle to capture the observable errors, showing weak to moderate correlations, with a third of the correlations indicating error masking. Only a subset of metrics accurately reacts to specific errors, while most correlations show either unresponsiveness or failure to reflect the error’s impact on summary quality.

The recent success of large language models for text generation poses a severe threat to academic integrity, as plagiarists can generate realistic paraphrases indistinguishable from original work.However, the role of large autoregressive models in generating machine-paraphrased plagiarism and their detection is still incipient in the literature.This work explores T5 and GPT3 for machine-paraphrase generation on scientific articles from arXiv, student theses, and Wikipedia.We evaluate the detection performance of six automated solutions and one commercial plagiarism detection software and perform a human study with 105 participants regarding their detection performance and the quality of generated examples.Our results suggest that large language models can rewrite text humans have difficulty identifying as machine-paraphrased (53% mean acc.).Human experts rate the quality of paraphrases generated by GPT-3 as high as original texts (clarity 4.0/5, fluency 4.2/5, coherence 3.8/5).The best-performing detection model (GPT-3) achieves 66% F1-score in detecting paraphrases.We make our code, data, and findings publicly available to facilitate the development of detection solutions.