MeetingBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Meeting Summarization

TL;DR

MeetingBank introduces a comprehensive benchmark dataset of city council meetings, enabling improved development of meeting summarization systems through its divide-and-conquer approach and rich annotations.

Contribution

This paper presents MeetingBank, a novel annotated dataset for meeting summarization, addressing the lack of corpora and providing a structured, manageable approach for summarizing lengthy meetings.

Findings

Dataset includes transcripts, summaries, and metadata for city council meetings.

The divide-and-conquer approach facilitates more effective summarization.

Publicly available to support future research in meeting summarization.

Abstract

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