MeetingBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Meeting Summarization
This addresses the problem of limited data for meeting summarization technology, particularly for confidential topics, by providing a publicly available dataset, though it is incremental as it builds on existing data collection efforts.
The authors tackled the lack of annotated meeting corpora for summarization by introducing MeetingBank, a benchmark dataset of city council meetings over a decade, which includes professionally written minutes aligned with meeting segments to facilitate summarization development.
As the number of recorded meetings increases, it becomes increasingly important to utilize summarization technology to create useful summaries of these recordings. However, there is a crucial lack of annotated meeting corpora for developing this technology, as it can be hard to collect meetings, especially when the topics discussed are confidential. Furthermore, meeting summaries written by experienced writers are scarce, making it hard for abstractive summarizers to produce sensible output without a reliable reference. This lack of annotated corpora has hindered the development of meeting summarization technology. In this paper, we present MeetingBank, a new benchmark dataset of city council meetings over the past decade. MeetingBank is unique among other meeting corpora due to its divide-and-conquer approach, which involves dividing professionally written meeting minutes into shorter passages and aligning them with specific segments of the meeting. This breaks down the process of summarizing a lengthy meeting into smaller, more manageable tasks. The dataset provides a new testbed of various meeting summarization systems and also allows the public to gain insight into how council decisions are made. We make the collection, including meeting video links, transcripts, reference summaries, agenda, and other metadata, publicly available to facilitate the development of better meeting summarization techniques. Our dataset can be accessed at: https://meetingbank.github.io