Meeting Browser: Tracking And Summarizing Meetings
Alex Waibel, M. Bett, Finke, Michael, Stiefelhagen, Rainer · 1998
To provide rapid access to meetings between human beings, transcription, tracking, retrieval and summarization of on-going human-to-human conversation has to be achieved. In DARPA and DoD sponsored work (projects GENOA and CLARITY) we aim to develop strategies to transcribe human discourse and provide rapid access to the structure and content of this human exchange. The system consists of four major components: 1.) the speech transcription engine, based on the JANUS recognition toolkit, 2.) the summarizer, a statistical tool that attempts to find salient and novel turns in the exchange, 3.) the discourse component that attempts to identify the speech acts, and 4.) the non-verbal structure, including speaker types and non-verbal visual cues. The meeting browser also attempts to identify the speech acts found in the turns of the meeting, and track topics. The browser is implemented in Java and also includes video capture of the individuals in the meeting. It attempts to identify the speakers, and their focus of attention from acoustic and visual cues.