Mining Text Conversations - Methods for Mining and Summarizing Text Conversations - page 69

Transcript:

...

S1: We happy to go
ahead?

Abstract:

...

Decisions:

S2: I think for most
of those ratings
that it's high
enough at the
upper end of the
scale for us to go
ahead with that.
S3: I think we -
yeah, I think we're
set.

...

The group decided
that the device
fulfilled enough of
the project's initial
goals to continue
in production.

Figure 3.12: Example decision sentences.

(the ratings justify continuing) and S3 to be an agreement . The point of resolution may, in fact, be
difficult to detect. Only if the speaker of S3 is the project manager who has final say on the matter,
then S3 should be considered the resolution of the decision process.
Using similar features as Hsueh and Moore, Fernandez et al. employed SVM classifiers in
a two-step approach, where sub-classifiers first predicted each decision class and a super-classifier
then took those predictions as its own features. They demonstrated that their hierarchical approach
to decision detection achieved a higher F-score than a “flat” approach to predicting the decision
classes.

3.4.4 ACTION ITEM DETECTION
Action items are sentences in a conversation that concern the assignment of responsibility for com-
pleting tasks. Such responsibilities can be self-assigned or delegated from one person to another, and
in this sense are related to dialogue act types such as commit and request . From the AMI corpus, we
can see two examples of the project manager assigning action items to the other meeting participants:

1. So you will have - Baba and David Jordan you will have to work together on the prototype.

2. And you will have next time to show us modelling a clay remote control.

Note that Sentence 2 contains a particular time-frame: the clay model must be shown by the

time-frame

next meeting. This is typical of action items in meetings, where the action items specify tasks to be
done in-between meetings. With emails, an action item may involve one person asking another to
do some task and then e-mail back as soon as possible.
The action items described in Sentences 1 and 2 also have “owners” - the person or persons owners