With the ubiquitous use of online meeting platforms and robust automatic speech recognition systems, meeting transcripts have emerged as a promising domain for natural language tasks. Most recent works on meeting transcripts primarily focus on summarization and extraction of action items. However, meeting discussions also have a useful question-answering (QA) component, crucial to understanding the discourse or meeting content, and can be used to build interactive interfaces on top of long transcripts. Hence, in this work, we leverage this inherent QA component of meeting discussions and introduce MeetingQA, an extractive QA dataset comprising of questions asked by meeting participants and corresponding responses. As a result, questions can be open-ended and actively seek discussions, while the answers can be multi-span and distributed across multiple speakers. Our comprehensive empirical study of several robust baselines including long-context language models and recent instruction-tuned models reveals that models perform poorly on this task (F1 = 57.3) and severely lag behind human performance (F1 = 84.6), thus presenting a challenging new task for the community to improve upon.

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.

Transcript segmentation is the task of dividing a single continuous transcript into multiple segments. While document segmentation is a popular task, transcript segmentation has significant challenges due to the relatively noisy and sporadic nature of data. We propose pretraining strategies to address these challenges. The strategies are based on “Next Conversation Prediction” (NCP) with the underlying idea of pretraining a model to identify consecutive conversations. We further introduce “Advanced NCP” to make the pretraining task more relevant to the downstream task of segmentation break prediction while being significantly easier. Finally we introduce a curriculum to Advanced NCP (Curricular NCP) based on the similarity between pretraining and downstream task samples. Curricular NCP applied to a state-of-the-art model for text segmentation outperforms prior results. We also show that our pretraining strategies make the model robust to speech recognition errors commonly found in automatically generated transcripts.

Keyphrase Prediction (KP) is an established NLP task, aiming to yield representative phrases to summarize the main content of a given document. Despite major progress in recent years, existing works on KP have mainly focused on formal texts such as scientific papers or weblogs. The challenges of KP in informal-text domains are not yet fully studied. To this end, this work studies new challenges of KP in transcripts of videos, an understudied domain for KP that involves informal texts and non-cohesive presentation styles. A bottleneck for KP research in this domain involves the lack of high-quality and large-scale annotated data that hinders the development of advanced KP models. To address this issue, we introduce a large-scale manually-annotated KP dataset in the domain of live-stream video transcripts obtained by automatic speech recognition tools. Concretely, transcripts of 500+ hours of videos streamed on the behance.net platform are manually labeled with important keyphrases. Our analysis of the dataset reveals the challenging nature of KP in transcripts. Moreover, for the first time in KP, we demonstrate the idea of improving KP for long documents (i.e., transcripts) by feeding models with paragraph-level keyphrases, i.e., hierarchical extraction. To foster future research, we will publicly release the dataset and code.

Automatically generating short summaries from users’ online mental health posts could save counselors’ reading time and reduce their fatigue so that they can provide timely responses to those seeking help for improving their mental state. Recent Transformers-based summarization models have presented a promising approach to abstractive summarization. They go beyond sentence selection and extractive strategies to deal with more complicated tasks such as novel word generation and sentence paraphrasing. Nonetheless, these models have a prominent shortcoming; their training strategy is not quite efficient, which restricts the model’s performance. In this paper, we include a curriculum learning approach to reweigh the training samples, bringing about an efficient learning procedure. We apply our model on extreme summarization dataset of MentSum posts —-a dataset of mental health related posts from Reddit social media. Compared to the state-of-the-art model, our proposed method makes substantial gains in terms of Rouge and Bertscore evaluation metrics, yielding 3.5% Rouge-1, 10.4% Rouge-2, and 4.7% Rouge-L, 1.5% Bertscore relative improvements.

Recent models in developing summarization systems consist of millions of parameters and the model performance is highly dependent on the abundance of training data. While most existing summarization corpora contain data in the order of thousands to one million, generation of large-scale summarization datasets in order of couple of millions is yet to be explored. Practically, more data is better at generalizing the training patterns to unseen data. In this paper, we introduce TLDR9+ –a large-scale summarization dataset– containing over 9 million training instances extracted from Reddit discussion forum ([HTTP]). This dataset is specifically gathered to perform extreme summarization (i.e., generating one-sentence summary in high compression and abstraction) and is more than twice larger than the previously proposed dataset. We go one step further and with the help of human annotations, we distill a more fine-grained dataset by sampling High-Quality instances from TLDR9+ and call it TLDRHQ dataset. We further pinpoint different state-of-the-art summarization models on our proposed datasets.