Two-step sentence extraction for summarization of meeting minutes

These days a number of meeting minutes of various organizations are publicly available and the interest in these documents by people is increasing. However it is time-consuming and tedious to read and understand whole documents even if the documents can be accessed easily. In addition, what most people want from meeting minutes is to catch the main issues of the meeting and to understand its contexts rather than to know whole discussions of the meetings. Existing text summarization techniques applied to this problem often fail because they are developed without considering the characteristics of the meeting minutes. In order to improve the performance of summarization of meeting minutes, this paper proposes a novel method for summarizing documents based-on two-step sentence extraction. It first extracts the sentences which are addressing the main issues. For each issue expressed in the extracted sentences, the sentences related with the issue are then extracted in the second step. Then, by transforming the extracted sentences into a tree-structure form, the results of the proposed method can be understood better than existing methods. In the experiments, the proposed method shows remarkable improvement in performance and this result implies that the proposed method is plausible for summarizing meeting minutes.