In this study, we construct a corpus of Japanese local assembly minutes. All speeches in an assembly were transcribed into a local assembly minutes based on the local autonomy law. Therefore, the local assembly minutes form an extremely large amount of text data. Our ultimate objectives were to summarize and present the arguments in the assemblies, and to use the minutes as primary information for arguments in local politics. To achieve this, we structured all statements in assembly minutes. We focused on the structure of the discussion, i.e., the extraction of question and answer pairs. We organized the shared task “QA Lab-PoliInfo” in NTCIR 14. We conducted a “segmentation task” to identify the scope of one question and answer in the minutes as a sub task of the shared task. For the segmentation task, 24 runs from five teams were submitted. Based on the obtained results, the best recall was 1.000, best precision was 0.940, and best F-measure was 0.895.

Recently, the credibility of information on the Web has become an important issue. In addition to telling about content of source documents, indicating how to interpret the content, especially showing interpretation of the relation between statements appeared to contradict each other, is important for helping a user judge the credibility of information. In this paper, we will describe the purpose and the way in the construction of a text summarization corpus. Our purpose in the construction of the corpus includes the following three points; to collect Web documents relevant to several query sentences, to prepare gold standard data to evaluate smaller sub-processes in the extraction process and the summary generation process, to investigate the summaries made by human summarizers. The constructed corpus contains six query sentences, 24 manually-constructed summaries, and 24 collections of source Web documents. We also investigated how the descriptions of interpretation, which help a user judge the credibility of other descriptions in the summary, appear in the corpus. As a result, we confirmed that showing interpretation on conflicts is important for helping a user judge the credibility of information.