MeetingBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Meeting Summarization
Yebowen Hu Tim Ganter Hanieh Deilamsalehy Franck Dernoncourt Hassan Foroosh Fei Liu
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