Xinyun Zhang


2023

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Reconstruct Before Summarize: An Efficient Two-Step Framework for Condensing and Summarizing Meeting Transcripts
Haochen Tan | Han Wu | Wei Shao | Xinyun Zhang | Mingjie Zhan | Zhaohui Hou | Ding Liang | Linqi Song
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Meetings typically involve multiple participants and lengthy conversations, resulting in redundant and trivial content. To overcome these challenges, we propose a two-step framework, Reconstruct before Summarize (RbS), for effective and efficient meeting summarization. RbS first leverages a self-supervised paradigm to annotate essential contents by reconstructing the meeting transcripts. Secondly, we propose a relative positional bucketing (RPB) algorithm to equip (conventional) summarization models to generate the summary. Despite the additional reconstruction process, our proposed RPB significantly compresses the input, leading to faster processing and reduced memory consumption compared to traditional summarization methods. We validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method through extensive evaluations and analyses. On two meeting summarization datasets, AMI and ICSI, our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches without relying on large-scale pre-training or expert-grade annotating tools.