Team Hitachi @ AutoMin 2021: Reference-free Automatic Minuting Pipeline with Argument Structure Construction over Topic-based Summarization
This work addresses the problem of efficient meeting documentation for organizations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing summarization and argument mining techniques.
The paper tackled automatic meeting minute generation and matching without using reference minutes, achieving the best adequacy score in Task A and outperforming a baseline in Tasks B and C.
This paper introduces the proposed automatic minuting system of the Hitachi team for the First Shared Task on Automatic Minuting (AutoMin-2021). We utilize a reference-free approach (i.e., without using training minutes) for automatic minuting (Task A), which first splits a transcript into blocks on the basis of topics and subsequently summarizes those blocks with a pre-trained BART model fine-tuned on a summarization corpus of chat dialogue. In addition, we apply a technique of argument mining to the generated minutes, reorganizing them in a well-structured and coherent way. We utilize multiple relevance scores to determine whether or not a minute is derived from the same meeting when either a transcript or another minute is given (Task B and C). On top of those scores, we train a conventional machine learning model to bind them and to make final decisions. Consequently, our approach for Task A achieve the best adequacy score among all submissions and close performance to the best system in terms of grammatical correctness and fluency. For Task B and C, the proposed model successfully outperformed a majority vote baseline.