VCSUM: A Versatile Chinese Meeting Summarization Dataset
This dataset addresses the data scarcity issue for researchers in meeting summarization, particularly for Chinese language applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing dataset efforts.
The authors tackled the limited data problem in meeting summarization by introducing VCSum, a versatile Chinese dataset containing 239 real-life meetings totaling over 230 hours, which supports various summarization tasks and includes benchmark models.
Compared to news and chat summarization, the development of meeting summarization is hugely decelerated by the limited data. To this end, we introduce a versatile Chinese meeting summarization dataset, dubbed VCSum, consisting of 239 real-life meetings, with a total duration of over 230 hours. We claim our dataset is versatile because we provide the annotations of topic segmentation, headlines, segmentation summaries, overall meeting summaries, and salient sentences for each meeting transcript. As such, the dataset can adapt to various summarization tasks or methods, including segmentation-based summarization, multi-granularity summarization and retrieval-then-generate summarization. Our analysis confirms the effectiveness and robustness of VCSum. We also provide a set of benchmark models regarding different downstream summarization tasks on VCSum to facilitate further research. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/hahahawu/VCSum.