User Requirements Analysis for Meeting Information Retrieval Based on Query Elicitation

Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, pages 1008–1015, Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007. c⃝2007 Association for Computational Linguistics User Requirements Analysis for Meeting Information Retrieval Based on Query Elicitation Vincenzo Pallotta Department of Computer Science University of Fribourg Switzerland Vincenzo.Pallotta@unifr.ch Violeta Seretan Language Technology Laboratory University of Geneva Switzerland seretan@lettres.unige.ch Marita Ailomaa Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland Marita.Ailomaa@epfl.ch Abstract We present a user requirements study for Question Answering on meeting records that assesses the difficulty of users ques- tions in terms of what type of knowledge is required in order to provide the correct an- swer. We grounded our work on the em- pirical analysis of elicited user queries. We found that the majority of elicited queries (around 60%) pertain to argumentative processes and outcomes. Our analysis also suggests that standard keyword-based In- formation Retrieval can only deal success- fully with less than 20% of the queries, and that it must be complemented with other types of metadata and inference. 1 Introduction Meeting records constitute a particularly important and rich source of information. Meetings are a frequent and sustained activity, in which multi- party dialogues take place that are goal-oriented and where participants perform a series of actions, usually aimed at reaching a common goal: they exchange information, raise issues, express opinions, make suggestions, propose solutions, provide arguments (pro or con), negotiate alternatives, and make decisions. As outcomes of the meeting, agreements on future action items are reached, tasks are assigned, conflicts are solved, etc. Meeting outcomes have a direct impact on the efficiency of organization and team performance, and the stored and indexed meeting records serve as reference for further processing (Post et al., 2004). They can also be used in future meetings in order to facilitate the decision-making process by accessing relevant information from previous meetings (Cremers et al., 2005), or in order to make the discussion more focused (Conklin, 2006). Meetings constitute a substantial and important source of information that improves corporate or- ganization and performance (Corrall, 1998; Ro- mano and Nunamaker, 2001). Novel multimedia techniques have been dedicated to meeting record- ing, structuring and content analysis according to the metadata schema, and finally, to accessing the analyzed content via browsing, querying or filter- ing (Cremers et al., 2005; Tucker and Whittaker, 2004). This paper focuses on debate meetings (Cugini et al., 1997) because of their particular richness in information concerning the decision-making proc- ess. We consider that the meeting content can be organized on three levels: (i) factual level (what happens: events, timeline, actions, dynamics); (ii) thematic level (what is said: topics discussed and details); (iii) argumentative level (which/how com- mon goals are reached). The information on the first two levels is ex- plicit information that can be usually retrieved di- rectly by searching the meeting records with ap- propriate IR techniques (i.e., TF-IDF). The third level, on the contrary, contains more abstract and tacit information pertaining to how the explicit in- formation contributes to …

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