Paper Reading #23: Improving meeting summarization by focusing on user needs: a task-oriented evaluation

Title:
Improving meeting summarization by focusing on user needs: a task-oriented evaluation

Comments:
Cindy Skach
Luke Roberts

Reference:
Hsueh, P. and Moore, J.  Improving meeting summarization by focusing on user needs: a task-oriented evaluation.  IUI '09.  http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1510000/1502657/p17-hsueh.pdf?key1=1502657&key2=8161472031&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=165.91.4.169&CFID=16209705&CFTOKEN=47524431

Summary:
This paper deals with the idea of summarizing meetings, but not simply the meetings themselves, but specifically the decisions made in the meetings.  There has been much work on meeting browsers and search structures that allow people to search for a specific part of the meeting, but often the most important part of the meeting is a decision that is made.  There was a pilot study in which participants witnessed four meetings and were asked to summarize the decisions made in these meetings for upper-management.  The end design attempts to automate this summary.  The summaries were reviewed and an implementation was made through a meeting browser.

The results found that a decision summary model of meetings was effective in increasing the effectiveness of people trying to get an overview of the decisions of a meeting.

Discussion:
The outcome of this model makes complete sense, that it is quicker to get an overview of the decisions made in a meeting by having a summary of the decisions themselves.  I think the novel part of this paper was the fact that they realized from previous work that it is, in fact, the decisions that are the important part of the meeting, while they only take up a brief portion of the meeting.  The technology seems like a good idea for people who need to quickly find the summaries of a meeting.