Introduction - Methods for Mining and Summarizing Text Conversations - page 7

Web−based 29%

Face−to−face 26%

Other 10%

Private meetings 11%

Conference calls 24%

Figure 1.3: The way we hold meetings is being transformed.

the existing threads? To make an informed decision you would like to see a summary of each
thread, to know, for instance, whether it is supporting or opposing the change, as well as what
are the most frequent arguments used to support/oppose the change.
In a very different setting you manage to join a long meeting only in the middle of it. Before
actively joining the conversation you would like to know what was said before. A meeting
summarizer could generate meeting minutes on the fly for you.

￿ Skim through a long message contributing to an ongoing conversation: You have just
received a long email, contributing to a conversation you have been involved in for several days,
along with a few other participants. You may not have time to read the message thoroughly.
Yet, you would like to quickly get an idea of the most important new information contained
in the message to decide whether you need to reply right away. A summary of the current
message, in the context of the previous conversation, would allow you to make this decision
more effectively.

￿ Business intelligence - Helping preserve corporate memory: As mentioned previously,
mining and summarization technologies can aid an organization carrying out a decision audit
in order to improve accountability and hone decision-making practices [ Murray et al. , 2009 ].
Such technologies could also be used by human resources staff to gauge employee effectiveness
and evaluate communication patterns. Being able to mine and summarize huge amounts of
conversational data could also potentially aid the generation of quarterly or annual reports
by retrieving data that existed solely in conversations and not in previous reports or formal
written documents. A great deal of corporate intelligence exists in informal correspondence
that can be translated to more formal documentation.