The Annotation and Analysis of Importance in Meetings

Meetings typically contain important regions that are likely to be the focus of summarization and recall requests. We present a new approach for labeling speech corpora with categories of importance at the level of utterance groups; these labels may help to identify focus regions for browsing, summarization, or question-answering. We ask whether importance can be consistently labeled by humans with the idea that these regions might be used to improve speech understanding and automatic summarization of speech and text. We present information about related annotation schemes for high-level speech labeling, including the relationship between this labeling scheme and pre-existing labels at the levels of utterances and groups of utterances. We provide a summary of the annotation system and labeling procedure, as well as preliminary inter-annotator reliability statistics on the ICSI Meeting Recorder Corpus.

ICSI Technical Report TR-06-003

Speech