A. Kathol and G. Tur, “Extracting question/answer pairs in multi-party meetings,” in Proc. 2008 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 5053–5056.
Abstract
Understanding multi-party meetings involves tasks such as dialog act segmentation and tagging, action item extraction, and summarization. In this paper we introduce a new task for multi-party meetings: extracting question/answer pairs. This is a practical application for further processing such as summarization. We propose a method based on discriminative classification of individual sentences as questions and answers via lexical, speaker, and dialog act tag information, followed by a contextual optimization via Markov models. Our results indicate that it is possible to outperform a nontrivial baseline using dialog act tag information. More specifically, our method achieves a 13 pct. relative improvement over the baseline for the task of detecting answers in meetings.