2009 Fifth International Conference on Signal Image Technology and Internet Based Systems Joining Meeting Documents to Strengthen Multimodal Thematic Alignment

Abstract: A study carried out on multimodal thematic alignment in the context of multi-document meetings is presented in the current paper. First, a classification of documents discussed in meetings is described. The alignment of dialog transcript with discussed documents is then presented based on two different approaches, either combining all documents within one (jointed), or align each document individually with the dialog transcript (disjointed). Furthermore, an entailment process that aims to improve the thematic alignment results is presented. The efficiency of this entailment process is assessed based on the two document arrangement strategies (disjointed/jointed), in addition to other features of discussed document (total/partial discussion and homogeneous/heterogeneous content). An evaluation of the presented techniques over different meeting corpora is then presented. The results tend to prove that the jointed strategy generates better results than the disjointed strategy, for both thematic alignment and entailment process. Moreover, the entailment process might have different effect on the thematic alignment results, depending on the features of the discussed documents. Keywords- thematic alignment; thematic links entailment; multi-document meetings; jointed alignment, disjointed alignment I