How Domain Terminology Affects Meeting Summarization Performance

TL;DR

This paper investigates how domain-specific terminology influences the effectiveness of meeting summarization systems, highlighting the importance of incorporating jargon knowledge for improved performance.

Contribution

It introduces a dataset with annotated domain terminology and analyzes its impact on meeting summarization accuracy, revealing significant effects.

Findings

Domain terminology substantially affects summarization performance

Annotated jargon terms are publicly released for future research

Inclusion of domain knowledge improves summarization results

Abstract

Meetings are essential to modern organizations. Numerous meetings are held and recorded daily, more than can ever be comprehended. A meeting summarization system that identifies salient utterances from the transcripts to automatically generate meeting minutes can help. It empowers users to rapidly search and sift through large meeting collections. To date, the impact of domain terminology on the performance of meeting summarization remains understudied, despite that meetings are rich with domain knowledge. In this paper, we create gold-standard annotations for domain terminology on a sizable meeting corpus; they are known as jargon terms. We then analyze the performance of a meeting summarization system with and without jargon terms. Our findings reveal that domain terminology can have a substantial impact on summarization performance. We publicly release all domain terminology to advance research in meeting summarization.