Coping With Aboutness Complexity In Information Extraction From Spoken Dialogues

Abstract

We report on the strategies in automatic summarization of spontaneous spoken dialogues. Our dialogue summarization system, MIMI, recognizes key linguisitc patterns and merges information to construct a summary of conference room scheduling dialogues. Dialogues about single reservations can be accurately summarized with a simple merging scheme, but we need several extensions and changes to cope with the aboutness complexity in unrestricted dialogues --- knowing exactly how many reservations are being discussed and which reservation values must be updated by subsequent utterances. A side effect of these extensions is a new problem of overrecognition caused by spoken language disfluencies. Keywords: Spontaneous Dialogues, Summarization, Information Extraction 1. INTRODUCTION A full understanding of spoken dialogues would need a full discourse understanding plus robustness with disfluencies. Such a system would require a lot of linguistic and world knowledge, and, if at all possible, wou..