Minuteman: Machine and Human Joining Forces in Meeting Summarization
František Kmječ Ondřej Bojar
Many meetings require creating a meeting summary to keep everyone up to date.
Creating minutes of sufficient quality is however very cognitively demanding.
Although we currently possess capable models for both audio speech recognition
(ASR) and summarization, their fully automatic use is still problematic. ASR
models frequently commit errors when transcribing named entities while the
summarization models tend to hallucinate and misinterpret the transcript. We
propose a novel tool -- Minuteman -- to enable efficient semi-automatic meeting
minuting. The tool provides a live transcript and a live meeting summary to the
users, who can edit them in a collaborative manner, enabling correction of ASR
errors and imperfect summary points in real time. The resulting application
eases the cognitive load of the notetakers and allows them to easily catch up
if they missed a part of the meeting due to absence or a lack of focus. We
conduct several tests of the application in varied settings, exploring the
worthiness of the concept and the possible user strategies.