Browsing Recorded Meetings with Ferret

Browsing for elements of interest within a recorded meeting is time-consuming. We describe work in progress on a meeting browser, which aims to support this process by displaying many types of data. These include media, transcripts and processing results, such as speaker segmentations. Users interact with these visualizations to observe and control synchronized playback of the recorded meeting

Holistic engineering design : a combined synchronous and asynchronous approach

To aid the creation and through-life support of large, complex engineering products, organizations are placing a greater emphasis on constructing complete and accurate records of design activities. Current documentary approaches are not sufficient to capture activities and decisions in their entirety and can lead to organizations revisiting and in some cases reworking design decisions in order to understand previous design episodes. Design activities are undertaken in a variety of modes; many of which are dichotomous, and thus each require separate documentary mechanisms to capture information in an efficient manner. It is possible to identify the modes of learning and transaction to describe whether an activity is aimed at increasing a level of understanding or whether it involves manipulating information to achieve a tangible task. The dichotomy of interest in this paper is that of synchronous and asynchronous working, where engineers may work alternately as part of a group or as individuals and where different forms of record are necessary to adequately capture the processes and rationale employed in each mode. This paper introduces complimentary approaches to achieving richer representations of design activities performed synchronously and asynchronously, and through the undertaking of a design based case study, highlights the benefit of each approach. The resulting records serve to provide a more complete depiction of activities undertaken, and provide positive direction for future co-development of the approaches

Augmenting IDEs with Runtime Information for Software Maintenance

Object-oriented language features such as inheritance, abstract types, late-binding, or polymorphism lead to distributed and scattered code, rendering a software system hard to understand and maintain. The integrated development environment (IDE), the primary tool used by developers to maintain software systems, usually purely operates on static source code and does not reveal dynamic relationships between distributed source artifacts, which makes it difficult for developers to understand and navigate software systems. Another shortcoming of today's IDEs is the large amount of information with which they typically overwhelm developers. Large software systems encompass several thousand source artifacts such as classes and methods. These static artifacts are presented by IDEs in views such as trees or source editors. To gain an understanding of a system, developers have to open many such views, which leads to a workspace cluttered with different windows or tabs. Navigating through the code or maintaining a working context is thus difficult for developers working on large software systems. In this dissertation we address the question how to augment IDEs with dynamic information to better navigate scattered code while at the same time not overwhelming developers with even more information in the IDE views. We claim that by first reducing the amount of information developers have to deal with, we are subsequently able to embed dynamic information in the familiar source perspectives of IDEs to better comprehend and navigate large software spaces. We propose means to reduce or mitigate the information by highlighting relevant source elements, by explicitly representing working context, and by automatically housekeeping the workspace in the IDE. We then improve navigation of scattered code by explicitly representing dynamic collaboration and software features in the static source perspectives of IDEs. We validate our claim by conducting empirical experiments with developers and by analyzing recorded development sessions

First Steps Towards the Automatic Construction of Argument-Diagrams from Real Discussions

This paper presents our efforts to create argument structures from meeting transcripts automatically. We show that unit labels of argument diagrams can be learnt and predicted by a computer with an accuracy of 78,52% and 51,43% on an unbalanced and balanced set respectively. We used a corpus of over 250 argument diagrams that was manually created by applying the Twente Argument Schema. In\ud this paper we also elaborate on this schema and we discuss applications and the role we foresee the diagrams to play

Comparing meeting browsers using a task-based evaluation method

Information access within meeting recordings, potentially transcribed and augmented with other media, is facilitated by the use of meeting browsers. To evaluate their performance through a shared benchmark task, users are asked to discriminate between true and false parallel statements about facts in meetings, using different browsers. This paper offers a review of the results obtained so far with five types of meeting browsers, using similar sets of statements over the same meeting recordings. The results indicate that state-of-the-art speed for true/false question answering is 1.5-2 minutes per question, and precision is 70%-80% (vs. 50% random guess). The use of ASR compared to manual transcripts, or the use of audio signals only, lead to a perceptible though not dramatic decrease in performance scores